Black hole myth busted: they don’t suck anything in | by Ethan Siegel | Starts With A Bang! | Jan, 2025
Many of us look at black holes as cosmic vacuum cleaners: sucking in everything in their vicinity. But it turns out they don’t suck at all.
Black holes are some of the strangest, most wondrous objects in all the Universe. With huge amounts of mass concentrated into an extremely small volume, their interiors inevitably collapse down to singularities, surrounded by event horizons from which nothing — not even light — can escape. In terms of ranking objects by density, black holes are the densest objects known to exist within the entire Universe. Whenever anything passes too close in the vicinity of a black hole, the forces from the black hole will tear it apart into its constituent particles. If ever any particles of matter, antimatter, or radiation crosses over the event horizon, those quanta will simply fall down into the central singularity, where they cause the black hole to grow by adding to its total mass.
These properties about black holes are all true. But if you ask people to tell you their conception of a black hole — including what it is and what it does — you’ll often find that there’s an idea associated with black holes that’s absolute fiction: that black holes suck any surrounding matter into them. This couldn’t be further from…
