Pedantry, thy name is this article.
this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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:nerd:
Ok.. so...
- Pull you in with the power of gravity
Does not 'suck' you in with the power of a vacuum...
About right?
You fall into gravity wells, they don't suck you.
Best way to understand is to get the mental image of spacetime as a 3d sheet like grid, where each object pushes down on it and creates a pit, or well. The bigger the object the deeper the well, and the more force you will need to stop yourself from sliding towards the object and propelling yourself back up the slope.
Well there goes my dream of getting sucked off by a black hole!
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!
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 it to say 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. 
If the topic was about equatorial bulge, and it got the various algorithms to calculate the distance between two points on our planet, might have been in danger of having are really good discussion.
But the semantics on black holes vs other celestial objects?! Nah ... that's just silly nonsense. Like discussing the weather or the colour of the sky.
The test is, at any point are we in danger of learning something useful? And if not, the OP is just blowing air up our bums.
Maybe chill with the ableism. You can call a removed a removed without bringing disability into it.
I think you're referring to the gardening implement, but Hexbear did a funny to your comment:
Have no idea what that comment was supposed to mean.
Looks like a word salad. I took it positively; he was just making a joke. And let it be.
What's confusing about being told to chill it with the ableism? You used dyslexic as a slur.
Edit: and then misspelt another slur
Assumes i know what ableism means. It means nothing to me. This is the truth. I could look it up, but it just looks like, lingoism. Just making up yet another bs term, that supposed to just learn about then there is 20 more terms and those need to be learned. It's a never ending loop of lingoism.
I have other interests. On github everyday, there is not enough time in the day. What my interests are actually matter when deciding what to put time into.
If this was my thing, i wouldn't dismiss it.
Censoring my speech, i'm also not really interested in. So i'll say some shiat and people will fake being offended and i'll fake caring that they are offended. Words will be exchanged and life will go on.
rinse wash and repeat
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Then, under that interpretation, whether a black hole "sucks in" depends entirely on the trajectory you have. I'd argue then that considering all possible trajectories, you are more likely to not be sucked in by the black hole.
The path the Earth traces isn't circular, it's more like it's spiraling forming ellipses around the Sun and progressively getting further and further away from it (so we are actually slowly being pulled out rather than sucked in). If instead of a Sun we had a black hole with the same mass, nothing would change in that respect, since gravity only depends on the center of mass.
The difference (other than the temperature and light) is that a black hole is very very dense so it would be much much smaller. This means you can get a lot closer to it and this is what makes the gravity skyrocket (since gravity relates to the distance squared). With a star, you can't get close enough to its center without reaching first the INSIDE of the star.. and once you are below the surface of the star then the mass between you and the center of the star gets progressively smaller the closer you get to its center (and the mass that's behind you will get higher and higher), so this dampens the gravitational pull.
Anyone else get the impression it's a slow news day?
"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