How do black holes “consume” light?
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Like you’re 5: light is actually made up of teeny-tiny particles called photons; photons, even though they’re ittty-bitty, still have mass (assuming you know what mass is); black holes are super duper strong balls of gravity that attract other things with mass to them (like grabbing ahold of them); in fact they’re so strong that, if a thing with mass -like a photon- gets close enough to them, the black hole won’t let go of the photon; the photons then have to live with the black hole and don’t get to go home or visit their families (not even on birthdays or Thanksgiving). So, since the photons that go too close to the black hole get grabbed by the black hole and don’t get to leave, they never get to come visit your eyeballs for you to see them.
Light is like a toy car driving on a carpet. The toy car is the fastest possible thing to exist.
Imagine the carpet is being pulled under the car faster than that.
I know that in actuality its a function of curved space not dragging space, but the effect is the same and it’s supposed to be ELI5, not ELI16.
Light always goes in a straight line at light speed when nothing else is acting on it, but gravity bends things to make light take curved paths.
Black holes have so much gravity that it can turn light all the way around, so light is going back the way it came from, so it can’t get back out.
The space where the black hole is is different than the space where we can see clearly, and that difference moves the light we might otherwise see away from our eyes.
For the nerds, the change in density and motion of the spacetime around the black hole refracts the light as it travels.
For example, try and hold a clear glass of water out in front of you and look directly through it to see a light. The light gets moved and causes weird bright spots and such and there’s positions where we don’t even see the light at all – this is refraction.
All black holes emit extremely bright lights too, they’re called jets. Look em up they’re neat, we need special telescopes to even see them
Really, I’d say ‘black hole’ is a misnomer. They behave much more like whirlpools in the media of spacetime
Everything that is massive pulls stuff towards it. The earth is massive, so people don’t float, but they are pulled to the surface instead by the gravitational pull.
Now, imagine something much more massive than the earth or sun. An object like that would not only pull humans, but also mich smaller and much bigger objects in quite some distance.
A black hole is so massive that it even pulls the light with its gravitational pull. So light is not reflected (and then seen by us), but it ‘stays’ there, because the pull is so strong. No reflection is seen by our eyes as black, hence a black hole.
Blackholes, due to its density of mass bends space around it.. Space is bent so much it folds into itself like a space whirlpool. Light passing by in straight lines but follows the bent space and falls into the blackhole..
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