From: geemail1801@gmail.com   
      
   According to some sources an object traveling toward a black hole seems   
   to go slower and slower as it approaches. And that eventually it appears   
   to stop at the event horizon. Perhaps my understanding of this is wrong.   
   But if that's what happens, how does anything get into a black hole? They   
   increase in mass over time, yes?   
      
   [[Mod. note --   
   Let's start with the simplest case: a non-rotating (Schwarzschild) black   
   hole (BH), and an object falling radially inwards towards the BH (so that   
   the object has no angular momentum about the BH).  And let's equip the   
   falling object with a light/radio transmitter so observers can monitor   
   its position.   
      
   Based on the light/radio signals, a distant observer will "see" the   
   object's infall appear to slow down and eventually "freeze" just outside   
   the BH's horizon.  The light/radio signals will also get more and more   
   redshifted.   
      
   But this "freezing" is an optical/radio illusion: the object actually   
   continues to accelerate inwards, and falls in through the BH's horizon   
   in a finite time.  The "freezing" is caused by the large gravitational   
   redshift of light/radio signals emitted by the object just outside the   
   horizon, taking a very long time to propagate outward to the distant   
   observer.  (More precisely, that propagation time approaches infinity   
   as the emission point gets closer and closer to the horizon.)   
      
   That is, if we imagine the infalling object emitting period light/radio   
   flashes, as the infalling object gets close to the horizon the flashes   
   take longer and longer to propagate out to a distant observer, and are   
   more and more redshifted in the process.  Once the object passes through   
   the horizon, its light/radio signals don't get out to the distant observer;   
   the distant observer sees only those signals emitted before the object's   
   horizon crossing.   
      
      
   For the more general case where the BH is spinning, everything above is   
   still true, but the mathematics is more complicated (the infalling object's   
   path won't stay radial unless it's falling in along the BH spin axis).   
   If the infalling object has angular momentum about the BH, then (depending   
   on the details) it may orbit the BH and not actually fall in.   
      
   There's a nice discussion of falling-into-a-BH in the physics FAQ at   
     https://apod.nasa.gov/htmltest/gifcity/bh_pub_faq.html#forever   
   -- jt]]   
      
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