Thank you for your very comprehensive and insightful reply. As an applied mathematician specialised in entirely different fields, I must ask though: why the foc

Thank you for your very comprehensive and insightful reply. As an applied mathematician specialised in entirely different fields, I must ask though: why the focus on the centre of mass of the whole infilling object? Surely one can subdivide the infalling object into a number of sub-units, each with its own centre of mass, all the way down to the subatomic level, and come to the conclusion that though each object’s centre of mass is relevant, it conflicts with the overall capacity to propagate signals across the breadth of the aggregate object? And what of the situation when the object is (from its own perspective) crossing the event horizon, so the centre of mass of the overall object is not yet within the event horizon itself? Folliwing your argument, if the centre of mass is what matters, then signals could still propagate upwards from the part that is already within the event horizon and into the parts of the object that are not yet within the event horizon, violating the whole intuition about what an event horizon actually is and what it means in a physical sense?