How do black holes “consume” light?
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Lots of answers here a five-year old wouldn’t understand…
Have you ever done that thing with a comb where you use the static built up on it to bend the water coming out of a faucet? Black holes have gravity that’s strong enough to do that to light. There’s a ring of bright light around a black hole where you can see light curving around the shape of the black hole just like water curves around the comb as the static pulls it out of its original path.
And a black hole’s gravity is just like earth’s gravity where it’s stronger, and pulls you towards it faster, the closer you are to it. Except the gravity of a black hole is *so* strong that when things get close enough to them, they’re travelling at the speed of light. Because nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, we stop seeing the things being pulled by the black hole’s gravity.
There’s a video from Mythbusters where they shoot a ball out of a cannon from the bed of a truck. The truck is travelling forward at the exact same speed that the ball is shot backwards out of the truck. The ball just drops straight down because the speeds are equal. That’s essentially what’s happening to all of the light that should be reflected back to us from a black hole. It’s not consumed, it just looks like it because it’s reflecting back towards us at the same speed that the thing it’s reflecting off of us travelling away from us.
There’s more scientifically accurate answers, but this is one that a five-year old could probably grasp.
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