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Originally Posted by rwald
Well, black holes suck stuff in the same sense that the Earth does. When you get closer to them, gravity will start to draw you inwards. Once you're close enough (whether this happens before or after the event horizon depends on the mass of the black hole), tidal forces will cause you to be streached out in the radial direction (towards the singularity) while also squeezing you along the tangential direction (perpendicular to the radial direction). So you would be squeezed into spaghetti. Eventually (in theory), even the molecules in your body would be subjected to these forces. Of course, no one outside the event horizon would see this. I could go into what they would see, but it's a bit complicated.
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Dead on. Black holes aren't cosmic vacuum cleaners. They're just a dense object with a strong gravitational field - an ultra-condensed star. The only thing that makes their gravity special is that black holes have an event horizon. All that means is that all of the mass in the black hole is within a certain radius, proportional to its mass. So long as you're outside that radius everything works pretty normally. Heck, you could even use Newton's laws and Kepler's laws to get a pretty good approximation of how things move. Its only when objects get *inside* the event horizon that they're stuck in the black hole.
Think about it like this. The classical laws of orbital motion tell us that r = GM/v, where v is the Earth's orbital velocity, G is the universal gravitational constant, M is the mass of the Sun, and r is the average distance from the Earth to the Sun. In other words, the Earth's orbit is determined by the mass of the Sun and the speed of the Earth. Since a black hole is just an ultra-condensed star, if the Sun were to compress itself into a black hole, it's mass would still be the same. Since there'd be nothing changing the Earth's speed, the Earth will keep on orbiting like nothing happened.
Taibak
PS: If you're curious, I got my equation from the Law of Universal Gravitation and the equation for centripetal force.
F = GMm/r^2 = mv^2/r
Since r is not equal to zero,
GM/r = v, therefore r = GM/v