Black holes are often portrayed as the ultimate cosmic vacuum cleaners, relentlessly sucking stars, planets and anything else that comes too close into an invisible abyss. But science says that picture is misleading. A black hole does not possess a mysterious suction force that reaches across space and drags everything toward it.
In reality, a black hole obeys the same fundamental law of gravity as every other massive object. What makes it extraordinary is not that it can pull objects from impossibly far away, but that an enormous amount of mass can be compressed into an incredibly small region of space.
