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🤔 Black hole myth busted: they don't suck anything in
(bigthink.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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I think the point the article was trying to make is that "sucking in with lots of force" does not really happen any differently outside the event horizon of a black hole than it would in the proximity of any other star (or object) with the same mass.
So it's addressing the "myth" that being in the proximity of a black hole would inevitably suck you in.. however, odds are that if you are not directly aiming for the black hole, even if you did not resist, you would just end up entering an orbit around it, the same way we are currently orbiting the Sun. Or maybe even be catapulted out of it, instead of sucked in.
The difference would be that past the event horizon you would be torn apart by the space distortion (instead of being cooked alive if it were a star). But theoretically if you can avoid crashing into a star, then you can avoid entering a black hole.
I mean, that's a pretty big caveat, given that strength of the gravitational force in the object was big enough to create the event horizon in the first place
Yes, but that's very localized and it's not the same as the image some people have of black holes characterizing themselves for instantly sucking it all in its vecinity.
If the teachings don't reach outside the classroom, you wouldn't say that people outside can learn more standing there than they would from any other similarly looking room. For a black hole, the gravitational pull over everything that you can see around it is the exact same as it would for a lower density equivalent mass you might be orbiting.
And we know there are stars heavier than some black holes, which actually would have a stronger pull to things in their proximity than if they were a black hole with smaller mass. Also Stephen Hawkins introduced the concept of micro/mini black holes. He theorized that the minimum mass for a black hole is in the order of 0.00000001 Kg. What makes a black hole have a singularity has more to do with its density than its mass, so if you could smash together a mass with enough strength you could cause it to collapse.