What are black holes and what happens to the things that get swallowed up?
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The heavier things are (think stars and planets and so on), the more influence they have on other objects via gravity. If you imagine a rocket leaving the moon, you would expect it to take less thrust compared to a rocket leaving the earth. Your rocket needs to be very fast if you want to leave a heavier planet or star.
Ultimately the speed you need to be is related to how heavy the star is, and also how close you were when you started. Unfortunately the universe has something like a speed limit, the speed of light.
You could imagine an object so heavy that if you’re close enough, you’d have to travel much faster than the speed of light to escape. Such an object would need to be very heavy, but also very small, for you to get that close in the first place. Therefore, it has to be very very dense.
For reasons beyond a 5 year olds understanding, light can be affected by gravity too, even though it’s massless. So an object dense enough can suck in all the photons around it too, thus a “black” hole.
As for what happens when you’re sucked in, the simplest answer is we don’t really know…
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