In the case of black holes, lights are pulled into by great gravitational force exerted by the dying stars (which forms into a black hole). If light has no mass, how is light affected by gravity?
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Imagine you have a big bed sheet, and 4 people are holding it tight at each corner. This creates a large, flat, plane — imagine this is the “fabric” (no pun intended) of space.
Now, cut a piece of yarn long enough to stretch straight across the sheet in any particular direction you like – this represents a particle of light traveling through space.
Now, take a softball or some other heavy ball and place it on the sheet. It will pull the entire sheet down, and the straight piece of yarn will now appear not straight. It’s still straight – you placed it straight, but the fabric underneath the yarn is now warped by the mass of the ball weighing on it.
This is how space works. Massive objects dont “pull” on the light with their gravity, they change the underlying fabric that the light is moving through. They pull the fabric of space “down” so that light moving in a straight line is now “bent” around the massive object as it follows the curve the heavy object has created. We call that a “gravity well” but its really caused by the mass of the object.
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