*Edit*
Thank you to everyone for the enlightening responses, I’ve learnt many many things and many have them have been in such clear terms that a giant idiot like myself has been able to understand.
The internet is excellent at times.
In: Physics
Event horizons are the “edge” of a black hole’s…blackness. It’s the point where the black hole’s gravity becomes so strong that light (and by extension everything else) can’t overcome it and gets pulled in, leaving only black nothingness.
This leads to another important aspect about black holes: The actual black hole object (the singularity) is an infinitely-small chunk of mass at the very center, and the hole part that we see is just an illusion, created because all the light that would otherwise travel to our eyes is being sucked into the hole.
Another important thing: If you were to fall into the black hole (assuming you weren’t ripped to shreds first), time would pass normally for you, and you would watch the universe shrink away behind you until you were surrounded by darkness and/or ceased to exist. Someone *watching* you fall in would see a different thing though. They would watch your descent slow down the closer you got to the event horizon, because the light “image” of you falling would become more and more distorted the closer you got. This would continue until you froze in-place completely, at which point you would just kinda fade away since the “image” of you falling in, also falls in with you.
And one last important thing: Most black holes have event horizons a few dozen miles wide at most. [But some, at the core of very bright galaxies, are orders of magnitude larger than the largest stars, and could swallow solar systems whole.](https://i.redd.it/lqtsqz7ahpq11.jpg)
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