Jesse Rogerson

You fall onto a black hole because it's an object with mass, right?

The only difference between that object and a planet, say, is that you just took a lot of mass and squished it down to a density so high that the escape velocity is beyond anything that we can muster.

And in fact, it's beyond light.

Light can't even escape from it.

So that's where the word black comes from.

It can't shine.

Light can't get away from it.

Light follows the fabric of space-time.

It goes in straight lines when...

When space is not curved, but if space is curved, it will follow the curve.

And this is the foundation of general relativity.

So when light goes like the sun, our sun bends space.

And when light, this is how they discovered that GR is correct, that Einstein is correct.

was correct with general relativity.

They looked at how the sun bent light during solar eclipses.

They were able to look right close to the sun and see how the light gets bent from the stars.

Anyway, so you have this incredibly curved space, so curved that light can't escape, and we call that a black hole.

But down there somewhere, there is matter, apparently.

We just can't get in there or observe it or fly into it and get the information out because the gravity is so strong.

Spaghettification?