Slowly Pulling Facts from Black Holes

lee1 writes "Astronomers have proven the existence of the event horizon, the 'point of no return' that surrounds black holes. An MIT and Harvard team said they showed its existence by looking for X-ray bursts from neutron stars and more compact objects thought to be black holes." Relatedly beuges writes "IOL is reporting that by tracking the death spiral of cosmic gas at the center of a galaxy called NGC1097, scientists figured that material moving at 177 000km an hour would still take eons to cross into a black hole. 'It would take 200 000 years for gas to travel the last leg of its one-way journey,' Kambiz Fathi of Rochester Institute of Technology told reporters at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society."

Comments

Re:Facts

[Shimmer]

so light being emitted from something almost at the Event Horizon but not yet inside the threshold takes a much longer time to escape and be seen by someone then it would in normal space going at 186,000 miles per second.

Not true. The speed of light is a constant, even near a black hole.

As I understand it, what actually happens to the light emitted by an object approaching an event horizon is that it gets increasingly red-shifted. So an observer at a safe distance would see the object "fade" into infrared and then into ever-longer radio waves until it crosses the horizon.