I’m not an astrophysicist, but that ends up being the weird perception thing about them, right? Mostly they’re like a star of the same mass, and then a few will get really big and be at the center of a galaxy, but the perception is that of a natural disaster.
Big ball of plasma in the center of the solar system that will definitely eventually explode and wipe out anything left alive on any surrounding planet? NBD. An object of the same mass but it’s smaller so it doesn’t shine? People picture it as being more immediately violent for some reason because the “light can’t escape” thing sounds so wild.
Yeah, black holes in media where they are depicted as a giant space vacuum cleaner is a big pet peave of mine. Unless you get really close, nothing is remarkable about the orbital mechanics of a black hole. The equivalent mass star would have burned you up at a much further distance than the gravity starts to become noticeably wonky.
It’s a shame that writers focus so much on the gravity and neglect accretion disks and astrophysical jets which do extend large distances and are visually stunning as well.
also the way they bend light, a proper physically simulated depiction of a black hole is so fucking cool because it just kinda intuitively looks like it’s so heavy it’s bending spacetime around it!
To be fair I think “light can’t escape” thing really just is that wild, it’s pretty captivating. The idea of it being the death of a star, one of the most important things to all life we know about, only adds to that sense. Stars are massive billion-year explosions, yes, but they also bring warmth and light and beauty. Black holes are the death of all of that, even if it’s not technically more dangerous from the same distance
Especially since we still don’t know how information preservation works in a black hole. There are ideas yes but we still aren’t sure if any of them are even right.
It’s not that light can’t escape that is scary it’s that the future of anything passing the event horizon changes to eventually end up in the singularity. Black holes are not just death, most of the things in the universe are death to us, black holes are literally the end of time.
Or they are passages to other universes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole#Einstein–Rosen_bridges
Still the end of time for our universe, like it mathematically is. And we haven’t found any white hole in our universe yet despite it probably being much easier than finding black holes or most of the other stellar objects.
Could the big bang be a white hole? And doesn’t it make sense the wormhole kind of meaning you “wait” in the black hole until the end of the universe and the beginning of a new one as it will look like time slows down for someone approaching a black hole for an outside observer but not for the person entering.
I don’t think we know how the end of the universe even from outside of the black hole would look like. If I remember correctly at some point even black holes may evaporate due to Hawking radiation.
As for the big bang being a white whole, there are a lot of problems. Like it would mean the universe started at one point in space and that’s the opposite of what we see that the universe started everywhere.
Why is nobody talking about how
marauding black death wrapped in a spherical gradient of tortured spacetime
is such a fucking cool sentence
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!
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.
Is it theoretically possible to shoot something through the ring? Or does the even horizon completely envelop it?
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.
“marauding black death wrapped in a spherical gradient of tortured space time” is a great title for a progressive rock or technical death metal song
thinking about the universe is already traumatizing
Where does it end? How are we floating? What if we fall? Where does it come from?
I don’t think about that a lot so it doesn’t give me anxiety
Plus, black holes may do contain universes. This year there was some evidence pointing that our universe is actually trapped inside one… ref: https://futurism.com/universe-trapped-inside-black-hole
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.
Teachers: You can’t divide by zero.
Nature: Hey guys, check this shit out.There are math models where dividing by zero makes sense. It’s just that those models don’t suit our world for now.
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.
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 ultraviolet catastrophe). (Edit: ultrasound was a typo).
I think you’re referring to the ultraVIOLET catastrophe
yeesh, what was the ultrasound catastrophe then?
Just FYI Superman has survived a black hole because the plot demanded it.
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… and 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…)
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
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime-singularities/lightcone.html
This points at that, you would also need to be able to travel faster than light and that would make you time travel backwards in time
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.
I’ve heard that ‘our reality is made of math’ before. Does this mean that we do in fact live 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?
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)
Our hopes and expectations == Black holes and revelations.
The CW flash can escape from a black hole
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
Flash is such a hilariously overpowered hero, it’s awesome
