Ive heard that a black hole elches light and radiation whenever something falls into its event horizon. What does that mean and why does that happen?
I’m am not sure what the person is referring to, but I will take a guess. They may be referring to what happens as material falls into a black hole through the action of an accretion disk. As large amounts of material approach a black hole, the material will generally find itself in an orbiting disk-like structure with the hole at the center (i.e., it will look a bit like an extremely crowded solar system). The disk will be extremely hot due to the friction between material with different orbital speeds at slightly different orbital radii. Thus the disk will radiate much light. Much of the incoming kinetic energy of the material is radiated away through this friction-heat-light process. This is what gives rise to the extreme brightness of quasars, and this process is what makes us able to (possibly) find stellar-mass black holes that are part of a double star system. In the latter case, infalling material from the neighbor star makes for the accretion disk around the black hole, and X-
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