is light matter?If light is not matter, how come a blackhole can suck everything including light? Explain...
When light gets sucked into a black hole, it doesn't really become sucked in by some sort of vacuum effect that you might think. To imply this is to say that the speed of light is overcome by the force/speed/momentum of gravity, which would be saying that cumulative gravity can travel faster than light. This of course is wrong. Black holes are regions of space where space becomes infinitely bent, meaning that light has no choice but to travel along this infinitely bent space. This then implies that light can never travel on any other path, meaning it is trapped in the black hole. Whether or not light is matter is disputed, but in this case it is also irrelevant. So long as light travels through space, it will adhere to gravity because gravity is simply bent space. Sometimes, people think that gravity is the result of particles called gravitons. This would then imply that light is definitely matter, has definite mass, and its energy can be overcome by these gravitons in instances where blackholes arise. This sounds as flawed as it looks.
Light is affected by gravity. Photons, though moving at the speed of light, have their paths curved around gravitational sources - the first evidence of this was in the eclipse of 1913, when Einstein's theory predicted that a particular star would be visible, even though it was likewise eclipsed by the sun. A black hole is a *very* intense gravitational source; if a photon's path takes it into the Event Horizon, then it (and everything else that crosses this barrier) disappears within the realm of the black hole.
Many wrong answers were provided to this question. 1.) Light is *not* matter, and does *not* have mass. 2.) Light is not measured as matter by any experiment I am aware of. The particle or quantum of light is a photon, which has no mass and is not part of the makeup of matter. The dual nature of light is that it can behave like a wave or a particle, not like matter and energy. 3.) Gravity affects both matter and light. All moving particle will follow curved paths near high-mass objects, as we have proven by measuring light of stars passing near the sun. We use this effect, called gravitational lensing, at very long distances to image objects beyond galaxies and galactic clusters. 4.) A black hole does not suck things in, it just has a very strong gravitational attraction. It's gravity is so strong that light nearby is bent not just a little (as with the Sun), but so much that it cannot escape.
light is observed to be matter when observed with energy, but observed to be enegry when observed with something physical. light has measured mass, but it's true form is both and neither as it is observed ... it's true form is formless and an understanding can be only approached when you do the math on the quantum level. a blackhole is a tear in the continuum ... anything that passes through is gone ... energy or matter [which are both the same thing, just perceived differently because of being perceived by different methods] also at the event horizon of a black hole, time appears stopped so nothing is seen going through ... when time is stopped everything goes dark ... things are still there but they appear to be gone ... it's all a matter of perspective.
Light is not matter because it has no mass. All matter has mass. The reason why gravity has an effect on light is because gravity bends space, so anything traveling in a straight line through space will change it's direction when it experiences curved space due to gravity. Since a black hole has such a strong gravitational field, the gravity near the event horizon bends space so much that any light traveling near the event horizon will fall into the black hole.
