What are black holes and what happens to the things that get swallowed up?
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Let’s try to keep this ELI5, shall we?
You know how the Earth has gravity? It turns out all matter in the universe has gravity. The more matter you have in one place, the stronger the gravity, which is why gravity is lower on the Moon than it is on Earth. Less matter, weaker gravity.
A “Black Hole” is nothing more than a point in space with a *lot* of matter, and therefore a *lot* of gravity. They aren’t “holes” in anything, there’s nothing on “the other side,” etc. They’re called “Black Holes” because the gravity is so powerful that even light is affected by it’s pull. I *looks* like a hole in space because there isn’t any light reflecting off of it for us to see.
As far as what happens when it pulls something in? In some ways, it’s no different than when the Earth pulls down a meteor. That meteor gets added to the mass of the Earth. Same concept for a “Black Hole,” whatever can’t escape its gravity get added to its mass (and therefore increasing the gravity). There are a *lot* of different theories about what happens to that matter under such extreme gravitational forces, but the truth is nobody really knows becase we can’t replicate the conditions in order to study them, and even if we *could* replicate them, we *still* couldn’t study them because we wouldn’t be able to see anything.
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