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You'd be hard pressed to ever directly observe something that is astronomically tiny and emits extremely low frequency radiation, if any at all.

When an accretion disk is actively ripping apart a celestial body the plasma is some of the hottest material in the current universe. It's extremely violent and bright. You're seeing a gravitational well converting a huge quantity of mass to energy.

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Yes, as I understand it, the “turn-on” effect is from the plasma generated while the star is falling into the gravity well. The bit of the star that passes the event horizon would be tiny.

Moreover, I believe that the radiation from an object falling into a black hole is redshifted so rapidly, that it effectively disappears from view in a very short time. An outside observer would not see anything “lingering” near the event horizon.

Yeah, the redshift and the slowing down due to time dilation are exactly the same phenomenon.

If the wavelength is a million longer, any event that would take 1 second to happen, appears to us as it took 12 days.

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