Looking in a Telescope

When we look in a telescope, we are only magnifying what we see.

We talk about seeing in the past because of how long the light took to get to us.  But what we see still has to be really big for us to tell anything about it.  Something like a supernova, or a star passing behind another star.  The people who talk about seeing people doing anything, are only working in their imagination.

Sometimes it is hard to sort out the imagination, or even science fiction from reality.  Like the people who talk about what happens when someone approaches a black hole.  One of the closest black holes that we know about is 6,000 light years away.   Not something we are likely to bump into anytime soon.    

How about the temperature of a Black Hole.   It is thought to be near absolute zero just because we can not get any information because we use light to get our information.  Light can not escape from a black hole -this is because of massive gravity.  A black hole is just like a star, except that it is packed into a smaller space.  Gravity has forced it into a small space relative to its mass.  There is no reason that it should not act like any other star.  Our sun is much hotter inside than at the surface.  While we do not get a report of the temperature  at the center of a Black Hole, It also will be very hot.  Why would it lose its temperature or its gravity just because we can not get reports about it.  We do actually get reports of mass and thus gravity by observing binary stars where one of them is a Black Hole.

Thus, we can actually predict what will happen (in speed) as an object gets close to it.  Orbits around a Black Hole will get faster as an object gets closer to it.  Eventually the orbit will have to be at the speed of light to stay in orbit.  This will strongly effect the ability of light to report anything that happens.  Time does not change, only the reporting changes.

Without a strong mass in the center of the Milky Way Galaxy,  the Galaxy would not stay together.  There is a massive black hole at the center.   We observe many objects in orbit around it.  This allows us to correctly measure the size and mass.