u/Syresiv

My understanding of something falling into a black hole is like this:

• Object approaches black hole
• As time passes, object starts to length contract, redshift, and slow down
• After a long period of time, it ceases to be visible, but never actually crosses the event horizon

But it seems to me that stellar corpse material crossing the event horizon is a critical part of it forming in the first place.

Does the infalling mass actually compress into the Schwarzschild Radius? And if so, how does it bypass the seeming infinite time required to enter one?

Or are the objects that appear to be black holes, in fact, just barely larger than their Schwarzschild Radius, and consequently hard to tell apart from true black holes from a distance?