How do black holes “consume” light?
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Black holes don’t really consume anything – they just have a strong gravitational field. That field is not of a different kind than the Earth’s, it’s just stronger. All gravitational fields bend the path of light. Gravity close to a black hole is so strong that it bends the path of light so that no matter what direction the light is traveling, its path will bend back until it is traveling deeper into the black hole. From our perspective far away from the black hole, it ends up looking like there’s a kind of surface that light doesn’t ever come out of, so it appears black. There’s not any material that the surface is made out of, the “surface” is just the distance from the black hole where all light always bends further in.
Because light goes at the fastest speed there is, we know that nothing could ever be fast enough to get out of that black area without its path being bent back towards the center -anything under that “surface” can never come out. That means that we can never learn anything about what is inside of the black hole. Nothing at all can ever come out of it – not light for us to see, nor a person to tell us what was in there.
However, physicists don’t think that you’d notice anything special if you fell through that black surface, called the Event Horizon. You’d just fall along towards the center due to the acceleration from gravity, just like you’d do if you fell off a cliff on earth – only much faster.
TLDR: a black hole is just a place where the gravity is very strong. The gravity is not of a different kind than what we feel here on earth, it’s just stronger.
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