A black hole is the point of no return

The argument

A black hole consists of immense mass collapsed into an infinitely small point, creating a huge gravitational force around the black hole. As something draws closer and closer to the black hole, it needs more speed to escape the pull of gravity. The event horizon is the boundary at which something would have to move faster than the speed of light to escape the black hole's gravity. Since the theory of special relativity establishes that nothing in the Universe can move through space faster than the speed of light, nothing can escape the black hole once across the event horizon. The event horizon for a stationary black hole is a sphere, while a spinning black hole created on that is more elliptical. Both event horizons are invisible because light cannot escape them. Anything inside the event horizon cannot be viewed, and events within the horizon can never be seen, hence the name. Black holes can only be seen by what is around them, not the actual hole itself. As gas or particles are sucked toward the black hole, they swirl around the event horizon and heat up with the immense speed, releasing lots of light and heat. Because of this, the outside of the event horizon appears glowing, while anything on the inside is perfectly black.

Premises

Counter-arguments

There are alternate theories for the idea of an event horizon that has grown in significance in recent years. The theory of Hawking radiation has clearly shown that some radiation can release from the event horizon, negating the idea that it is an inescapable boundary. Other physicists have argued that black holes consist of multiple objects with fuzzy boundaries and that the event horizon is not a concrete or exact boundary.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The infinitely small point is what general relativity predicts rather than something observed, and it is widely regarded as a sign that the theory breaks down where quantum effects matter. The horizon and the singularity are also separable: a horizon forms once mass lies within a certain radius, whatever the interior turns out to be, and for a supermassive black hole the average density within the horizon can be very low — which makes "immense mass in an infinitely small point" a misleading route to the conclusion. [Rejecting P2] The escape-velocity picture is a Newtonian analogy that reaches the right answer for the wrong reasons. In general relativity nothing inside the horizon is simply moving too slowly to get out; rather, every future-directed path leads inward, because the horizon is a feature of the causal structure of spacetime rather than a place where gravity is locally overwhelming. For a sufficiently large black hole, nothing unusual is felt at the crossing. [Rejecting P3] The observational point is sound, and the imaging of the shadows around the objects in M87 and at the centre of the Milky Way has since made it concrete. But the counter is right that the boundary is not absolute in the way the premise states: Hawking radiation is predicted to be emitted, and the tension between that and the loss of information is one of the open problems the alternative pictures were proposed to address — though that radiation is not matter escaping from within, and is far too faint to detect for any known black hole.