Since Earth is spherical, however, taking that path would actually be far longer than the path depicted. One would normally assume that this flight would just cross over the United States, passing through Maine, and then right over the Atlantic Ocean. If you look at the figure to the right, this is the plot for an airline flight with no layovers from Seattle to London. Real-life examples of this are actually in use on a daily basis.

On a curved surface, this is not the case. The truth is, the straight line theory only works in two-dimensional space such as on a piece of paper.

Yes, your elementary teachers lied to you. Here is a mind-bender for you: The shortest distance between two points is not always a straight line. The shortest distance between Seattle and London is not a straight line The Shortest Distance Between Two PointsĪs a rule, light will always travel the shortest distance between two points. At the event horizon of a black hole, space-time actually bends into itself! To make things far more complicated, black holes take this to the extreme. This distortion is exactly what happens in space wherever mass can be found. That heavy ball creates a distortion in your trampoline. Now put a bowling ball on top of the trampoline. This is what space-time would look like if there were no mass to distort it, except that space has three dimensions, not just two.

To explain, imagine an empty trampoline sitting in your backyard. More mass creates a larger bend in spacetime. The real culprit is the mass of a black hole and its effects on space-time.Įverything that has mass causes the spacetime around it to bend. But contrary to what you may think, gravity is not the key component in a black hole's ability to trap light. This is why the planets revolve around the sun, and not vice-versa. The more mass an object has, the more gravity it has. The only reason you can't see the center where all this mass is because no light is reflected off it because the black hole's gravity is too great.In order to understand why light gets sucked into black holes, it is first important to understand a few particular traits of the black hole.Īs you may know, everything with mass has gravity. But the stuff that fell in adds to the mass of the black hole, which has a bigger gravitational field as a result. There are some interesting issues about 'the state of matter' that comprises a black hole, and whether you can even call it matter. Because of this, I think when something gets sucked up by a black hole, it just gets crushed up with all the other mass and adds to it. This means a black hole must be a very compact sum of mass that has a lot of gravity. This is why dying stars forms black holes. The important thing is that at the event horizon the 'coordinate' speed of light is zero, so light can't get out.

According to Wikipedia, 'The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform spacetime to form a black hole'. I want to know where stuff goes after being sucked up by a black hole. I've heard that stuff sucked up by a black hole leads to a parallel universe, but I don't believe that. Into the black hole, increasing its mass. Where does stuff sucked up by a black hole go?

Getting sucked into a black hole