system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
We detect black holes from x-ray signatures, right? Why aren't the black holes sucking up those x-rays, how do they escape?

My admittedly very layman's understanding of black holes is that a primary way of detecting them is from x-rays formed as matter falls into them and is torn apart.  But the gravitational field of a black hole is strong enough that even light can't escape, so how can x-rays make their way out?
gpt
So, black holes aren't cosmic vacuum cleaners, sucking up everything in sight. They're just gravitational bodies you can get *a lot* closer to than normal. Imagine we compressed the sun down a good bit. You can imagine being at its surface now, and then being at its compressed surface, the gravitation would be stronger. But overall the rest of us orbiting the sun don't really notice (gravitationally speaking). Keep on compressing it through the various states of "matter" and eventually you can get so close to the center of mass that the escape velocity to *leave* the surface is now c. That's the point when it becomes a black hole. 

So now with black holes out there, there's stuff orbiting the black hole, just like we orbit the sun... and as the stuff orbits it collides with other orbiting stuff. That causes things to fall inwards closer to the black hole, where the densities get even higher, causing more collisions, and so on. The gas and stuff falling in gets *so* hot it glows. Glows in the XRay spectrum at that. But it hasn't fallen all the way in yet, so the XRays are totally fine to escape out to us from there.

So it's not like we're seeing the black hole *itself*. We're seeing the stuff falling into the black hole glow super brightly. Like being able to see all of the planets going around the sun and inferring that a sun must be at the center (even if the sun wasn't visible).