Your mom comes back from a 3 week work trip and is enraged of the trash pile house. It smelt like moldy cheese and sweaty socks but you got used to it. “This is a filthy house,” mom gags, “You better clean it up.” So, you sprint to get the vacuum cleaner, because if your mom says something it has to be done in an instant. Plus, she has been on an energy exhausting work trip. Although, you are mad at her, you were just watching a baseball game. No one wants to clean while in the middle of a baseball game. You wished a black hole would come down and suck all the dirt and smell from this house. Then you wonder, do black holes suck everything in like a vacuum cleaner? Let’s pop this balloon to find out!
What is a black hole?
A black hole is a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape it, not even light. It forms when a massive star runs out of fuel and collapses under its own weight, crushing an enormous amount of mass into an extremely small space. The boundary around it is called the event horizon — cross that line and there is no path back out, which is why the region appears black. The first image of a black hole’s surroundings was captured in 2019 by the Event Horizon Telescope, and in 2020 the Nobel Prize in Physics went to work establishing that black holes form as a consequence of general relativity. They come in different sizes, from ones a few times the mass of our Sun to supermassive ones at the centers of galaxies, including Sagittarius A* at the center of our own Milky Way. Astronomers detect them indirectly, by watching how nearby stars move or how matter heats up as it spirals inward, since the object itself gives off no light.
Do black holes suck everything in like a vacuum cleaner?
This myth is false. Black holes do not suck everything like a vacuum cleaner. From far enough away, their gravity is exactly like that of any other object with the same mass. If you replace the Sun with a similar mass black hole, planets would keep going as they are without any change, besides it becoming very cold. Orbit depends only on the two masses and the distance between them — and none of those changed. In fact, black holes actually throws matter out with its winds of enormous power that can shut down the growth of entire galaxies. So the cosmic vacuum cleaner is sometimes blowing rather than sucking. This myth came from two sources. One of them is the name itself - black hole. When someone says a black hole, people picture a hole which you fall into. The second source is Hollywood. Hollywood normally portrays cosmic vacuum cleaners sucking everything in sight, time-traveling tunnels, and portals to other dimensions.
Fun Facts
Black holes aren’t holes. They’re the opposite — matter packed in rather than emptiness. The name is the single biggest cause of the myth. To actually be pulled in, you have to cross inside the Schwarzschild radius. Nothing outside that is trapped. A black hole with the Sun’s mass would be about 3 kilometers across. The Sun is nearly 700,000.