My understanding is that the singularity is not proven to exist and many physicists believe it is an artifact of our incorrect understanding of the physics involved.
Black Holes
Submitted 3 weeks ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://mander.xyz/pictrs/image/388465d3-dfc0-4b54-a498-63522c627311.jpeg
Comments
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
Skua@kbin.earth 3 weeks ago
Well, what exactly is inside the event horizon is unproven because we cannot possibly look. All of the rest of the physics seems to check out, though, and we know that there are things out there that behave just like our models of black holes predict. It's an incomplete understanding rather than a necessarily incorrect one. If it is something else, it'd have to be something that looks more or less exactly like a black hole to an outside observer
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 3 weeks ago
I would think an object of extremely high density could be difficult to distinguish from a point of infinite density, especially given the nature of the event horizon.
marcos@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
All of the rest of the physics seems to check out, though
What is the entire problem, because all of the rest of the physics don’t get you coherent answers around a black hole.
jerkface@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
All of the rest of the physics seems to check out, though
You know, except for the actual singularity
pressanykeynow@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
All of the rest of the physics seems to check out
If the whole universe comes from the singularity and you need just a tiny fraction of it in a limited space to create a black hole, why the universe even exists and even more so, it’s expanding?
jerkface@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
There are no naked singularities
90s_hacker@reddthat.com 3 weeks ago
Why is nobody talking about how
marauding black death wrapped in a spherical gradient of tortured spacetime
is such a fucking cool sentence
Apytele@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I’m just excited to see people having knock down drag-out fights about how scientifically accurate tumblr prose is on a comm that’s not my responsibly to moderate!
Skua@kbin.earth 3 weeks ago
I suppose cosmic horror elder gods like Cthulhu and such are not all that far removed from the idea of a black hole. Particularly the ones that are less involved with Earth than Cthulhu is. Nobody is ramming a black hole with a fishing boat. But the early writing on them was done at about the same time as a lot of the foundational theoretical work on black holes (not the earliest stuff but I can believe that the writers didn't know about it)
Sergio@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
pressanykeynow@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
If I remember Lovecraft correctly the whole idea was that human mind can’t comprehend such things. And black holes fit very nicely.
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
black holes seem pretty comprehensible to me? like there’s a lot of math and programming that’s way harder to wrap your head around
Natanael@infosec.pub 3 weeks ago
Also, extremely pedantic note - black holes were predicted by looking at what happens in the math at extreme densities, long before black holes were actually observed in space
WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
And some of the scientists who worked on those early calculations assumed it meant the physics was incomplete!
radix@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Teachers: You can’t divide by zero.
Nature: Hey guys, check this shit out.pressanykeynow@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
There are math models where dividing by zero makes sense. It’s just that those models don’t suit our world for now.
t_berium@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Now get this: some scientists think black holes might have hair.
MagicShel@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Everything was hairy back in the 70’s.
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
But can you comb it all into the same direction?
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
yes because they have a bald spot due to high testosterone levels
jerkface@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Keep in mind that all the cliches about black holes are about non-rotating black holes, which don’t exist in reality. In reality, a spinning black hole has a ring singularity, not a point, and behaves much weirder and even less intuitively than the hypothetical non-rotating counterpart as it smears out spacetime into taffy.
Shayeta@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Is it theoretically possible to shoot something through the ring? Or does the even horizon completely envelop it?
jerkface@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
It is, and you won’t believe what happens!
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
the event horizon is effectively a sphere, like inflating a donut-shaped balloon (that can’t pop). Eventually the middle hole is going to close like a sphincter (enjoy that imagery) and the whole thing will approach the shape of a sphere because that’s what anything becomes when you inflate it hugely.
Zerush@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
The Black hole isn’t a ring, it’s a fuckin sphere, the ring surround it in it’s equator. Grinded material more and more acelerated until almost the speed of light nearby the hole, from where it falls into the hole to end as something nobody knows. Like the swirl formed when you take out the plug of the sink, but the hole in the middle is a sphere.
13igTyme@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Just FYI Superman has survived a black hole because the plot demanded it.
leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
graph function singularities exist as physical features in our world
Do they, though…?
As I (mis?)understand it, as a massive star begins to collapse, getting denser and denser, the gravitational gradient gets steeper and steeper… time (from the perspective of an outside observer) gets slower and slower… to the point that, from our point of view, the full collapse (or maybe even any collapse below the Schwarzschild radius?) hasn’t happened yet, and won’t happen until the extremely distant future, beyond the end of the universe…
So, in that sense, from the point of view of “our world”, no singularities (except possibly the big bang) would ever exist (yet), all of them being censored not only by event horizons, but by being shoved into the perpetually far future, beyond time itself…
And, speaking about event horizons, isn’t the whole “light isn’t fast enough to escape” concept a misinterpretation of sorts…? As I (again mis?)understand it, it’s not a matter of speed, but of geometry… The way space-time is twisted in such a gravitational gradient, once you get past the event horizon there are no longer any directions pointing towards the outside.
Which is another from of cosmic censorship (or a different effect or interpretation of the above), preventing anything inside the event horizon from causally interacting with the outside universe…
So, if these singularities are hidden beyond sight, causally, visually, and geometrically isolated from the rest of the universe, and perpetually shoved into the far future… can they really be said to exist in our world…?
(Of course there’s always the big bang, but we can’t really observe that one, only its effects, and it’s not necessarily exactly what the original post was talking about anyway…)
Legianus@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
I think you explain it pretty well, but one thing to add. Due to the General Relativity and thus spacetime it is actually not directions that all point toward the singularity, but as soon as you cross the event horizon all of your future becomes the Singularity, not as a point in space, but a point in time
Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
all of your future becomes the Singularity
There is some small burn-off Hawking radiation that escapes and gradually reduces the mass (and information content) of the black hole. Some of that would be you.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
Our hopes and expectations == Black holes and revelations.
SomethingBurger@jlai.lu 3 weeks ago
And the superstars sucked into the supermassive
ThatGuy46475@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The CW flash can escape from a black hole
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
I remember reading this single page image from the flash where he was talking about how much he did in an atto second.
If that’d be true,nthe flash could create black holes at will or even by accident if he isn’t careful
warbond@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Flash is such a hilariously overpowered hero, it’s awesome
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
GOOD point
Univ3rse@lemmynsfw.com 3 weeks ago
The fact that there’s some of them hurtling through space, unrestrained by the common movements of the rest of the galaxy, is really something to think about.
Carrolade@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It’s in the same vein as gamma ray bursts. Could possibly cause problems, but space is so big, so heavily occupied by empty space, that the odds of ever encountering one vs just more empty space is almost infinity:1.
I mean, our planet is billions of years old and hasn’t encountered a single one yet, based on the fact it’s still comfortably in orbit around the sun.
Asteroids are far, far more concerning. Encountered a bunch of those already.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
Idk, I don’t think most scifi pushes the envelope of what we can imagine, rather it provides a convenient escape to galaxies less incomprehensible than the bewilderment of earth where the author can make a point about spacewar and unstoppable mindless empires.
shrugs
Scifi (like any other genre) needs to continually reaffirm its association with creativity, not assume because paper thin character types are fighting spacewars that it counts as pushing the envelope of our imaginations.
/end side rant
Wolf@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
I’ve heard that ‘our reality is made of math’ before. Does this mean that we do in fact living in a simulation, even if that simulation wasn’t necessarily programmed by ‘higher dimensional’ beings?
If that is the case, could we conceivably ‘hack’ the universal code and unlock cheat mode?
BlueMagma@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
We don’t need to “live in a simulation” for “our reality to be made of math”. Math could very well exist outside of anything, as a formal concept. This is the old debate asking whether math is invented or discovered. If it is discovered, then it can exist without any reality, as a pure abstract concept.
Shareni@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
MissJinx@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
thinking about the universe is already traumatizing
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
that’s the fun part, everything is always falling!
Juice@midwest.social 3 weeks ago
Reality is not made of math, this is why scientists need to take philosophy of science classes. I’m a big fan of math, very cool and useful. And math allows us to make a map of reality and events, an abstraction albeit an incredibly powerful and practical one.
But a map of terrain isn’t the terrain itself no matter how detailed and accurate it is. Views like this are what creates bad ideas like we live in a computer simulation, that terrifies and confuses people. Without people there is no math, period. Dont make science into a religion.
lemmyseizethemeans@lemmygrad.ml 3 weeks ago
They really drive home the point that we can’t understand time
dwindling7373@feddit.it 3 weeks ago
Tell me you don’t understand black holes using a lot of words.
As far as gravity goes they are equivalent to the star that they collapsed from and just as deadly.
The difference is that you can get that much closer before “impacting” with it, but you and superman would be fucked pretty much at the same distance from it.
And I think you need a lot less than 300 writers to conjure an idea that leverage our fantasy in more and better ways.
sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
And an infinitely dense point in spacetime doesn’t necessarily exist: it’s just what general relativity predicts is at the center of a black hole.
The last time our physical model of the universe predicted an infinite value, we ended up discovering new physics eventually (the ultrasound catastrophe).
Ageroth@reddthat.com 3 weeks ago
I think you’re referring to the ultraVIOLET catastrophe
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet_catastrophe
Wolf@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
If the singularity at the center of a black hole didn’t exist, and was just extremely dense instead, would all of the other properties that we know is true about black holes be able to exist? For example we know that Sag A* and that one other black hole we ‘imaged’ give off no light, would that still be possible without a singularity?
Wirlocke@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
Nothing you said about black holes really contradicts what they were saying? Even if a star and black hole can have the same gravity, there is still a shell of space that once you pass you cannot ever return. I’m sure Superman could go into a star and come back out, not so much with a black hole.
dwindling7373@feddit.it 3 weeks ago
No. You can’t ever get out of a lot of shit.
From a common star, if you can make your mass somehow be almost 0 and your speed being almost c, you can get out.
drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
I mean, the gravitational gradient is much higher. To me this kind of sounds like saying “there’s nothing that special about a 10 watt laser, an LED lightbulb puts out the same amount of light”, but a 10 watt laser is enough to instantly and permanently blind you.
Its true that there’s nothing that special about orbiting a black hole, but I think its not really logically inconsistent to say “even if superman could survive dipping into a sun he probably wouldn’t be too happy if he stuck his arm into an event horizon”.
Cat_Daddy@hexbear.net 3 weeks ago
You’d also likely burn to death pretty early on in the process. Like, the moment you cross the event horizon, instant death.
woodenghost@hexbear.net 3 weeks ago
Actually you wouldn’t notice anything special crossing the event horizon. You’d just continue to fall.
Railing5132@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I knew before coming into the comments there would be a pendatic with this argument
dwindling7373@feddit.it 3 weeks ago
And you were right! Kudos to you!