Thread: Do you ever die when you fall into a black hole?

Originally Posted by Seismosaur

No, the light never reaches the "actual" black hole, so you will still be able to see the object forever.

What do you mean the light never reaches the "actual" black hole? The light passes through the event horizon and gets sucked directly to the "actual" black hole. This is why it doesn't escape, no?

No, it stops.

Everything that goes into a black hole just sits around it.

Originally Posted by Seismosaur

No, it stops.

Everything that goes into a black hole just sits around it.

I never addressed this one directly, but you are both right and wrong. The light (just as everything that goes into a black hole) just sits around the black hole. That part is true (well, sort of true, because most things that get sucked into a black hole are turned to cosmic dust, because the gravity is too great for anything to just "sit" there without being atomized). But it's not the light's existence, alone, that makes us able to see objects. It is light bouncing off of a surface and into our eyes that allows us to see it.

If an object gets sucked into a black hole, then the light that bounces off of it does not bounce back into our eyes. It tries to, but it gets drawn back to the original object because of the gravitational field of the black hole. This, again, renders both the collapsed star and the object in question invisible. That is why black holes are black. If the light bounced off and into our eyes, we would see the remnants of a collapsed star, and not a black void.

This is also how "invisible cloak" technology works. Fiber-optics bend the light around an object so that the photons don't bounce directly off the object into our eyes and, instead, they are funneled to another direction, rendering the wearer of the cloth "invisible."