Quote:
Originally Posted by alextokyo
But if something can escape from a black hole, while light can't, then surely that something must be traveling faster than light...  |
It doesn't work like that. Black holes don't let anything escape, not even light.
What we see are actually Quasars.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasar
Huge clouds of gas that are right near a supermassive blackhole and due to the huge gravitational forces around the blackhole, some particules are actually ejected at very high speeds BEFORE reaching the event horizon. Particles that are past the event horizon don't "ever" make it back.
"Ever" is however a relative term for if you wait more than 10 to the power 100 years , after all the stars died out and everything is pitch black (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe ) , even black holes will start to evaporate -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation - and slowly start to lose their mass