Imagine you're looking out into deep space.
What you see is a dark, empty space filled with tiny, twinkling stars. Think of them like distant lights scattered in the darkness.
Right in the middle of your view, there's a black circle. This is the black hole. It looks dark and mysterious, almost like a hole punched in space.
Now, watch the stars closely. You'll notice they are not just standing still. They are gently drifting and moving across your screen, slowly moving around like tiny fireflies in space.
Here's the cool part: As some of these drifting stars get closer to the black hole, something strange happens to them! They start to look distorted and bent. It's like they are being stretched and warped as they pass by the black hole.
Think of it like looking through a magnifying glass or a warped piece of glass. Things you see through it get bent and look funny. The black hole is acting like this cosmic magnifying glass, bending the light from the stars that pass nearby.
The closer a star gets to the black hole, the more stretched and bent it looks. When it moves further away from the black hole again, it slowly goes back to its normal, round shape.
It's like the black hole is playing tricks with the starlight! It's showing you how incredibly strong the gravity of a black hole is – so strong that it can even bend the path of light itself, and that's what you are seeing as the stars get distorted.
So, what you are seeing is a simple picture of stars moving in space, and whenever they wander too close to the powerful black hole in the center, they get visually stretched and bent – a little like how real black holes bend light in space, making things look warped and distorted around them.