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- Hacker News
- This kind of result is why GR still surprises after a century. Geometry beats intuition.by t_marsden
- How does one descr blackhole to a non-physicist without losing much accuracy? I just it of a very-dense-object.by dekdrop
- Why not just say it's something with such strong gravity you can't escape even if you go at the speed of light? Maybe that loses too much accuracy for you?by inigyou
- Consider a balloon. I don’t imagine in visuals but if you do, either a solid color or a patterned balloon works. Let’s say it’s a cow print design.
Deflate it, then stretch the balloon over a vacuum cleaner tube and put on a rubber band to keep it in place.
If you pour sand on it, you can only get a small bump of sand and then it’ll run off the sides. Reasonable, logical, normal behavior. Clearly it’s a surface — it’s holding sand, it’s pouring sand in different directions over the edge, the sand is not all compacted into a single grain.
Turn on the vacuum cleaner. Assume a balloon stretchier than the strongest vacuum cleaner in the universe. What happens? Several things, each of which are perfectly reasonable:
1) The end of the tube is still a circle, and the balloon is still attached and covering the tube, so it’s still a two-dimensional circle.
2) A single grain of sand can’t block the vacuum tube, so it clearly hasn’t collapsed to a point.
3) The covered end of the vacuum cleaner tube is still the same circle, with the same diameter, as it was before you turned on the vacuum.
4) You can pour buckets more of sand onto that stretched circle of balloon than the handful you could before.
5) If you pour enough sand onto the circle, it’ll behave just like it did before: the sand will form a small mound and then newly-poured sand will run off whichever side the sand was poured on.
6) The rubber band is going to catch some of the overflowing grains of sand and hold onto them (‘accretion’), near but just outside the circle.
Next: Consider a more powerful vacuum cleaner. How much more? Lots. The most. An atomic Dyson powered by nuclear fusion. (This is a bit unrealistic, but that’s astrophysics for you.)
How much sand can you pour onto that two-dimensional, circular, balloon surface?
Lots. The most. Some of it will spill around the edges and get caught in the accretion band, but somehow that circle, that’s still the same size and clearly still blocking the vacuum tube, can hold an entire universe of sand.
That’s how black holes work :)
ps. For those who dislike the crudity of my teaching analogy and want to pop the spherical cow balloon: Topologically, the surface covering the vacuum tube is always a circle, even if you have an infinitely-powerful vacuum cleaner. At no point — pun intended — can a vacuum cleaner apply a transformation applied that reduces the dimensionality of the surface, thus it must remain, topologically, a circle.
pps. So clearly I must choose the circle in front of me! Hahaha! Aaaahahahah!
ppps. dies
by altairprime - "A really interesting and cool thing for astronomers to talk about...but you might want to pray that not one of 'em ever comes within a million trillion miles of the Earth."by bell-cot
- A one-way door in space.by icepush
- The problem there is that not even the physicists completely agree on the details, because we know black holes definitely exist, but every explanation breaks one rule or another that should apply from different disciplines. It's part of why they get so much ongoing attention.by crooked-v
- Normally people think of gravity as pulling on objects. You can instead think of it as pulling on the space those objects are in.
A black hole happens when there is enough gravity that space gets pulled inwards somewhere, at at least the speed of light.
Gravity falls off with distance, and the distance where space is being pulled inwards at exactly the speed of light is called the "event horizon".
It has this name because speed of light is the speed of causality: events that happen further in, are "over the horizon" for you, they cannot causally influence you.
by ben_w - It's a region of space from where not even light can scape.
You can get a region like that by squashing a lot of mass in a small space, like happens when a star collapses under its own gravity. So here the intuition of "high density" makes sense.
But at the center of galaxies you have the so called "supermassive black holes" which are more or less comparable in size to the solar system and yes, they have a lot of mass but they are not very dense, a pop-sci trope is comparing it's density to cotton candy or even the air we're breathing right now.
So it's a matter of how you distribute mass/energy in a given diameter, not exactly of density.
by pantulis - The primary issues with black holes and singularities (as well as the numerous endless debates about them) is due to admitting only a single temporal dimension as the sole representation of the universe. Once you allow multiple temporal dimensions (at least two non gauge constrained ones) the issues disappear entirely.by rfgplk
- The issue is that we only observe one dimension of time and three dimensions of space. So allowing more than that would require a lot of evidence.
Postulating that there's multiple times dimensions is the same thing as postulating that there's more than three space dimensions in string theory. You make the maths "easier" by postulating that there's more dimensions, but you don't make any predictions that the 3+1 spacetime theory doesn't make and that can be observed experimentally.
by DexesTTP - > Counterintuitively, in general relativity two points can be spatially close yet causally distant.
Can the converse also be true in general relativity?
by amelius - Yes, during cosmic inflation for example: two test objects initially close can end up many light-years apart. If we make these test objects null (i.e., lightlike) then we can always contrive an inflation that stretches them apart in such a way that they still meet again.
Some exotic spacetimes involving pp-wave sandwiches can focus initially non-converging and spatially distant light pencils onto each other at a caustic shortly after the passing of the stack of plane-parallel gravitational waves. One can hide some such processes in the early cosmos.
by raattgift - > Black hole singularity is a surface not a point
Might they be trying to say this?
1. The boundary of the black hole which traps light, etc, is called the event horizon, and sits at the Schwarzschild radius. This is a geometric surface.
2. There is no singularity at this surface.
3. In models of black holes, there is a gravitational singularity at a point in the centre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_singularity which is a topic with nuances.
by kazinator - No, they are theorizing about the Kerr metric. The Kerr metric describes rotating black holes and instead of a point like singularity predicts a ring of zero thickness with infinite density additional work posits the ring is unstable and collapses to a surface all inside the event horizon, they then proceed to make predictions about the nature and behavior of that surface.
By the way the Kerr metric predicts a ring because the centrifugal acceleration due to the rotation partially counteracts the gravity. As far as I understand, not a physicist.
- They do speak of the gravitational singularity (not the event horizon). It's within the horizon, there is a contradiction between the need for two infallers' position to reach the singularity (thus hitting a point) and the causal impossibility of them actually meeting (following General Relativity?). This suggests that the point should maybe be a surface.
I don't follow most of the arguments however.
by Mithriil - treating a black hole as a point, or ;) pointicle,may be valid as matter may be condensed, to the, I mean ,in such a way that there is NO space left whatsoever, and therefor no room for physical dimensions to exist in, and the entire body functions as an undiferentiated body of stuff, or giant pointicle that destroys time and space. Hopefully very soon we will get news about our galaxys central black holes interaction with a star that is orbiting very close but at 8% light speed, which may reveal if our blackhole is spinning, and if that is the case the we would have proof of energy/information/gravity waves? escaping from a black hole, along with gravity which while apparently imune to its self, nothing else is so far.by metalman
- Off-topic, but it makes me think of "reasoning black holes": you get enough like-minded people together that they start reinforcing each other's logic and beliefs until not only those people get completely detached from reality, but anyone who interacts with them gets sucked in as well unless their own logic ("velocity") is adequate to skirt the edge and escape, forever altered by the experience.
Similar questions arise: how would you know if you were inside one? The laws of logic ("physics") seemingly don't apply, but there's no way to test them in that environment.
by sfink - I believe that's called an echo chamber, and exemplified by a board meeting.by inigyou
- Kinda sounds like a "linguistic manifold."
- Perhaps you're thinking of something like this?by phrotoma
- I dunno. Those rationalists seem to be in some kind of intellectual black hole which never had any danger of sucking me in. Like I have seen many strands of posthumanism and transhumanism, speculations about an intelligence explosion circa 1970, and figure it would have been just as much fun to sit around the campfire, pass a joint around, and talk about crazy stuff with these guys
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_cosmism
as it would be to do with anyone contemporary. In their orbit I get periodically annoyed but changed forever, no.
by PaulHoule - I know this isn't a new discovery but I fully expect the next major theoretical physics breakthrough to be discovered by a frontier LLM at this point, given their aptitude at solving a lot of the recent mathematical conjectures.by lukeify
- what's really going to blow your mind is
while you probably assumed or knew spinning black holes move space around them
spinning black holes also move TIME around them
* https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ady9068
so in theory a spinning black hole that's been around for billions of years has a time drag around it in a path that is billions of years old
(no we can't navigate it because yes that would be time travel to the past and violates causality)
black holes are just so weird with every new detail even more weird
oddly more interesting to me to try to grasp neutron stars (densest objects before black holes and are still visible, our entire solar system in a neutron star would be only 10km 6.2miles across)
by ck2 - > densest objects before black holes
Not quite, I think a (theoretical) quark star would be higher density?
by SoftTalker - >what's really going to blow your mind is while you probably assumed or knew spinning black holes move space around them spinning black holes also move TIME around them
Well, isn't called space-time for nothing. You can't have one without the other. Like in electromagnetism. I thought it was kinda obvious since Einstein and Minkowsky.
by aeve890 - Time travel breaks causality if you assume Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Multi-world interpretation allows it as you just end up in a self-consistent "branch" and you would be stuck there.
Like you can travel back in time and kill one of your ancestors before he/she had children. In that branch you wouldn't be born, but since you come from another branch the system remain consistent.
(If you are interested look at David Deutsch’s quantum model of Closed Timelike Curves).
by marcyb5st - It blows my mind that, in the frame of an outside observer, time appears to stop at the event horizon. An observer falling through the horizon (who survived the radiation and tidal forces) would not perceive this.by mdavidn
- Consider the magnetar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar
"A magnetar's 10^10 tesla field, by contrast, has an energy density of 4.0×1025 J/m3, with an E/c2 mass density more than 10,000 times that of lead."
by srean - Another thing that may blow the minds of some is that M87* is less dense than air at 0.44kg/m³ so if you could bring it to sea level (in a large enough theoretical test area) it would float like a helium balloon (sea level air is 1.2kg/m³).
Of course if you did do that, the air itself would collapse into a black hole larger than M87*...
by My_Name