Astronomers capture supermassive black hole as it eats passing star

[cemaphonic]

10. To put in into a somewhat more human and familiar scale, imagine a meteor hurtling towards Earth.

Broadly, there are 3 things that can happen:

1) It could crash into the Earth.

2) If the velocity and trajectory are just right, the meteor will be captured by Earths gravity and go into orbit.

3) If it is coming in fast enough, it will exit Earth's gravitational pull, but its trajectory and velocity will be altered while under Earth's influence. We have used this case several times in our own space program, such as when we used Jupiter's gravity to accelerate the New Horizons probe on its way to Pluto.

Black holes have a gravitational feature known as an "event horizon," which is the point beyond which not even light can escape. Anything entering the event horizon suffers the first fate, which is what you're thinking of. But the gravitational influence of a black hole extends far beyond its event horizon, so a lot of the matter being pulled towards a black hole will either settle into orbit, or be flung away at extremely high velocities (near light speed in some cases).

If it wasn't for all of the matter (and light) being flung away from black holes, we wouldn't be able to detect them - they would remain a purely theoretical construct.