*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 definitionally a boundary beyond which events cannot affect the observer. Specifically, this is a concept that applies to black holes – in an ELI5 sense, imagine a marble in a deep pot with a curved bottom. By swirling the pot around, you can get the marble to climb the walls, but imagine that this pot had sides so steep and tall that no amount of swirling could get that marble out. If one were to imagine that marble is a photon, the highest point you could get the marble swirling would be the event horizon – if anything, marble, spaceship, rubber duck, were to get into the pot beyond that point, it doesn’t matter how fast it’s going, it’s stuck in there. Since light itself can’t escape the event horizon, you can’t actually see or even detect what goes on beyond that point – and due to relativity (if someone figured out an ELI5 on relativity, that would be entertaining to read) the closer an object got to the event horizon, the slower it would appear to go, so someone watching something go over the edge would just see it slow down to a complete stop as it entered. Black holes are wild.
EDIT: Kurzgesagt came out with a really neat video on this topic a few weeks ago – [check it out](https://youtu.be/QqsLTNkzvaY)!
Latest Answers