this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 18 minutes ago

Ok.. so...

  • Pull you in with the power of gravity

Does not 'suck' you in with the power of a vacuum...

About right?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 minutes ago

Well there goes my dream of getting sucked off by a black hole!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 minutes ago

Pedantry, thy name is this article.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (2 children)

The only way to pop a hmm boner is to apply tunnel vision to only view the situation in the context of Physics, completely ignoring or dismissing linguistics which is applying a word to describe the effects by a laymen.

A star bends light

A blackhole captures light

A planet maybe wobbles

So applying a term sucks in is completely valid, linguistically.

Then some dyslexic comes along to correct us. There is always these patronizing caunts. Do we really need to be reminded that black holes and gravity are correlated?!

urbandictionary comes along and another term is born, poking fun at these robotic patronizers

Captain Obvious the space between his ears is not a vacuum, it's this or that gaddaingit!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 24 minutes ago

Maybe chill with the ableism. You can call a removed a removed without bringing disability into it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 36 minutes ago

Saw a clip of ol Neil coming along and saying that Mount Everest wasn't the highest point on Earth to a physicist because of the equatorial bulge and "sea level" not mattering to physicists.

Yeah sure just blatantly disregard the entire human perspective of the world and how we as people relate to make up some dumb "gotcha haha" to sound smart.

So many people, him specifically, are incapable of framing things in a non dismissive way. It could have been an interesting point or piece of information about how how large the equatorial bulge is, but he'd rather come off as an insufferable nerd. nerd

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 hours ago

Anyone else get the impression it's a slow news day?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (3 children)

Eh thats kinda nitpicky. For non physics people "sucking in with lots of force" is good enough to describe "absurdly strong gravitational pull". Its not a myth, its an over simplification.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I disagree. It is more than just a nitpick. Saying black holes suck things in implies that they are doing something different than any other mass. Which they are not. Would you say a star sucks in stuff around it? Or a planet? Or moon? No. That sounds absurd. It makes it sound like blackholes are doing something different to everything else - which is miss-leading at best. They way things are described matter as it paints a very different picture to the layman.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Would you say a star sucks in stuff around it? Or a planet? Or moon?

For a star, I absolutely would. For a planet or moon, it depends on the context.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

Would you say our planet is currently being sucked in by the Sun? or would you rather say that we are just orbiting the Sun?

Because odds are that if you approach a black hole without aiming directly for it, you might just end up in an orbit around it, not unlike we currently are around the Sun. Or you might even be catapulted out, instead of being "sucked in" in the popular sense.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 39 minutes ago

In the case of the earth, no, I would say its an orbit. But if the path wasn't circular and instead was describing the sun pulling somthing away from its existing trajectory significantly, then yes, I might describe it as the sun sucking it in. Obviously doubly so if it actually is destroyed by the sun.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

It's exactly the same gravitational pull as the star that previously collapsed... (And I've not read the article (yet), this is just a personal nitpick that I've had for a LONG time).

--edit after reading the article--

In terms of inevitably falling into a black hole, it’s only the material that formed interior to three times the event horizon radius — interior to what’s known as the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO) in general relativity — that would inexorably get sucked into it. Compared to what actually falls into the event horizon in our physical reality, the purported “sucking” effects are nowhere to be found. In the end, we have only the force of gravity, and the curved spacetime that would result from the presence of these masses, affecting the evolution of objects located in space at all. The idea that black holes suck anything in is arguably the biggest myth about black holes of all. They grow due to gravitation, and nothing more. In this Universe, that’s more than enough to account for all the phenomena we observe.

That summary explains it better than I can.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 hours ago

"This is the only context in which black holes even appear to suck matter in: as they absorb matter that undergoes gravitational infall due to the black hole’s mass"

I may not be the smartest of person but this article seems to contradict itself a little