You'll never directly see them fall in, but you will see them "disappear" pretty quickly as the light is redshifted past the point of visibility, etc. The more

You'll never directly see them fall in, but you will see them "disappear" pretty quickly as the light is redshifted past the point of visibility, etc. The more sensitive whatever tool you are using to detect the photons is, the longer you can watch, and something that approaches infinite sensitivity would be able to see you for a time period that also approaches infinity, but outside of the realm of the theoretical, anything falling in to the black hole will wink out of existence in a fairly large hurry once it reaches the event horizon. But things like accretion disks and these relativistic jets are happening outside of the event horizon, so they're not subject to these same concerns to begin with. For example, the accretion disk of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, has an accretion disk that is roughly 1/100th of a light year, or about 25 times the size of our solar system. The event horizon, however, is only about 16 million miles - or a roughly 1/6th the distance between the sun and the earth. (These numbers are based on our current best estimates - and those estimates have changed frequently over the past 20 years as we get better data, but the general scale should be quite accurate)