Many of us look at black holes as cosmic vacuum cleaners: sucking in everything in their vicinity. But it turns out they don’t suck at all.

Key Takeaways

• Black holes are the densest objects in the Universe, with at least several Suns worth of mass collected in a region that’s so small, even objects moving at the speed of light can’t escape from it.

• Although these objects exert a tremendous gravitational force, they don’t “suck matter in” any differently than neutron stars, white dwarfs, stars, or planets do: they just gravitate normally.

• Despite the common picture of black holes sucking everything in from their surroundings, that’s not how they work at all. Black holes don’t suck; that’s just the most common myth about them.