[let’s get (meta)physical]
Let’s talk about black holes. A black hole is a patch of space from which nothing can escape, including light.
How does this work? Well. It has to do with escape velocity. As an object of mass is crushed and becomes denser, the gravitational attraction it has increases. Escape velocity has to do with how fast an object has to travel in order to break the attraction (example: the escape velocity of earth is 7 miles a second). When a huge star has burnt out, it goes into supernova. The debris left over collects into an extremely dense object called neutron star. If by some chance the neutron star is too large, the gravitational forces become waaay too huge and overwhelms pressure. The neutron star continues to shrink until *pop* - ya have a black hole.
The point at the center of a black hole is called a singularity - there, time and space does not exist. Around singularity, you have the event horizon, which is the point of no return for objects approaching a black hole.
Light travels 186 thousand miles a second.
Only when something (including light) gets within the event horizon, will it not be able to escape. Farther away things do not get pulled in. Stars and planets beyond that distance will orbit around the black hole as they always had - the black hole has the same mass as the star, it’s just compressed into one smaller point (hence the massive gravitational pull within the event horizon). Things continue on as they always have, as long as an object doesn’t come within the black hole’s path.
The denser the mass, the greater the pull.
Not even light can escape.
Right.