{pickpocket}

While black holes are certainly frightening, they’re not nearly as powerful as most people think. We forget that, as big as they are, they still have mass. This means that no matter how big and absurdly strong they might seem, they also have finite strength.

In other words, a black hole is just like every other object in the universe, in that its gravitational pull can only be as powerful as its mass allows it to be. If it’s the mass of the sun, its pull is the same as the sun’s. No more, no less. Physics is a thing even black holes have to obey. There is no special mechanism that makes it suck things in beyond regular ol’ gravity, and gravity has to obey the same rules as everything else.

Say what you want about the universe, that last sentence makes us feel a bit better about it. It’s comforting to know that even something that can drag time itself into the drain has to play by house rules.