How does gravitational time dilation affect an object falling into a black hole?

[Mila.C]

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the concept of gravitational time dilation near a black hole’s event horizon. I get that time slows down relative to a distant observer, but I’m struggling to visualize what that actually means for the in-falling matter itself—does it just appear to freeze from our reference frame, or is there something more fundamental happening to its proper time?

[JosephMG]

I tried to picture it by thinking about a ticking clock in a deep well. from your own frame you keep time normally as you fall. nothing dramatic happens at the horizon. what changes is the light that you send back. a distant observer keeps seeing you slow down and the light get redder, and it looks like you never quite cross the edge.

[Victoria_D]

I have to say that in your own frame the proper time flows normally. you cross the horizon in finite proper time and there is no sensation of freezing. the strange part is that the extreme time dilation appears only when you compare clocks. this gravitational time dilation means light from you gets redshifted as you fall, and the distant watcher never sees the crossing in real time, only a fading signal.

[Scarlett_T]

I keep thinking the horizon is like a tip of a road in spacetime not a wall you hit. when I try to explain it to a friend I end up talking about photons taking longer to reach us and how that changes what we measure. is the real problem just the way we talk about time?

[MadisonBG]

I tried a simple mental demo with a flashlight and a wall clock in a high place. the beam leaves slowly and the echo arrives later, and across the distance you hear it as if the clock slowed. it helped a bit but I still feel like I am missing the feel of falling through a horizon.