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Simulated view of a black hole in front of the Milky Way. The hole has 10 solar
masses and is viewed from a distance of 600 km. An acceleration of about 400 million
g is necessary to sustain this distance constantly.[1]
General relativity
Introduction to...
Mathematical formulation of...
[show]Fundamental concepts
[hide]Phenomena
Kepler problem Lenses Waves
Frame-dragging Geodetic effect
A black hole is a region of space in which the gravitational field is so powerful that
nothing can escape after having fallen past the event horizon. The name comes from
the fact that even electromagnetic radiation (e.g. light) is unable to escape, rendering
the interior invisible. However, black holes can be detected if they interact with matter
outside the event horizon, for example by drawing in gas from an orbiting star. The
gas spirals inward, heating up to very high temperatures and emitting large amounts
of radiation in the process.[2][3][4]
While the idea of an object with gravity strong enough to prevent light from escaping
was proposed in the 18th century,[5] black holes, as currently understood, are described
by Einstein's theory of general relativity, which was developed in 1916. This theory
predicts that when a large enough amount of mass is present within a sufficiently
small region of space, all paths through space are warped inwards towards the center
of the volume, leaving all matter and radiation with nowhere else to go.
While general relativity describes a black hole as a region of empty space with a
pointlike singularity at the center and an event horizon at the outer edge, the
description changes when the effects of quantum mechanics are taken into account.
Research on this subject indicates that, rather than holding captured matter forever,
black holes may slowly leak a form of thermal energy called Hawking radiation.[6][7][8]
However, the final, correct description of black holes, requiring a theory of quantum
gravity, is unknown.
Contents
[hide]
19 External links
Non-rotating
Uncharged Schwarzschild
Rotating
Kerr
The event horizon is the defining feature of a black holeit is black because no light
or other radiation can escape from inside it, excluding Hawking radiation. So the
event horizon hides whatever happens inside it, and we can only calculate what
happens by using the best theory available, which at present is general relativity.
The gravitational field outside the event horizon is identical to the field produced by
any other spherically symmetric object of the same mass. The popular conception of
black holes as "sucking" things in is false: objects can maintain an orbit around black
holes indefinitely, provided they stay outside the photon sphere (described below),
and also ignoring the effects of gravitational radiation, which causes orbiting objects
to lose energy, similar to the effect of electromagnetic radiation.
Photon sphere
A non-rotating black hole's photon sphere is a spherical boundary of zero thickness
such that photons moving along tangents to the sphere will be trapped in a circular
orbit. For non-rotating black holes, the photon sphere has a radius 1.5 times that of the
event horizon. This may give the impression that a black hole will accumulate a 'shell'
of captured photons, which will grow in density indefinitely, but this is not true. No
photon is likely to stay in this orbit for long, for two reasons. First, it is likely to
interact with any infalling matter in the vicinity (being absorbed or scattered). Second,
the orbit is dynamically unstable due to light's enormous speed; small deviations from
a perfectly circular path will grow into larger deviations very quickly, causing the
photon to either escape or fall into the hole.
Other extremely compact objects, such as neutron stars, can also have photon spheres.
[10]
This follows from the fact that light "captured" by a photon sphere does not pass
within the radius that would form the event horizon if the object were a black hole of
the same mass, and therefore its behavior does not depend on the presence of an event
horizon.
Accretion disk
An artist view taken from the Hubble Space Telescope website showing an accretion
disk around the black hole. The friction from the gas generates a massive amount of
heat. The heated gas emits X-rays.
Space is not a pure vacuum - even interstellar space contains a few atoms of hydrogen
per cubic centimeter.[11] The powerful gravity field of a black hole pulls this towards
and then into the black hole. The gas nearest the event horizon forms a disk and, at
this short range, the black hole's gravity is strong enough to compress the gas to a
relatively high density. The pressure, friction and other mechanisms within the disk
generate enormous energy (which causes the gases to turn into plasma) - in fact they
convert matter to energy more efficiently than the nuclear fusion processes that power
stars. As a result, the disk glows very brightly, although disks around black holes
radiate mainly X-rays rather than visible light.
Accretion disks are not proof of the presence of black holes, because other massive,
ultra-dense objects such as neutron stars and white dwarfs cause accretion disks to
form and to behave in the same ways as those around black holes.
Two important surfaces around a rotating black hole. The inner sphere is the static
limit (the event horizon). It is the inner boundary of a region called the ergosphere.
The oval-shaped surface, touching the event horizon at the poles, is the outer
boundary of the ergosphere. Within the ergosphere a particle is forced (dragging of
space and time) to rotate and may gain energy at the cost of the rotational energy of
the black hole (Penrose process).
Rotating black holes share many of the features of non-rotating black holesthe
inability of light or anything else to escape from within their event horizons, accretion
disks, etc. But general relativity predicts that rapid rotation of a large mass produces
further distortions of space-time, in addition to those that a non-rotating large mass
produces; and these additional effects make rotating black holes strikingly different
from non-rotating ones.
Ergosphere
A large, ultra-dense rotating mass creates an effect called frame-dragging, so that
space-time is dragged around it in the direction of the rotation.
Rotating black holes have an ergosphere, a region bounded by
on the outside, an oblate spheroid, which coincides with the event horizon at
the poles and is noticeably wider around the "equator". This boundary is
sometimes called the "ergosurface", but it is just a boundary and has no more
solidity than the event horizon. At points exactly on the ergosurface, spacetime is dragged around at the speed of light.
on the inside, the outer event horizon.
observer), because that would require them to move backwards faster than light
relative to their own regions of space-time, which are moving faster than light relative
to an external observer.
Objects and radiation can also escape from the ergosphere. In fact the Penrose process
predicts that objects will sometimes fly out of the ergosphere, obtaining the energy for
this by "stealing" some of the black hole's rotational energy. If a large total mass of
objects escapes in this way, the black hole will spin more slowly and may even stop
spinning eventually.
Ring-shaped singularity
General relativity predicts that a rotating black hole will have a ring singularity which
lies in the plane of the "equator" and has zero width and thicknessbut remember
that quantum mechanics does not allow objects to have zero size in any dimension
(their wavefunction must spread), so general relativity's prediction is only the best
idea we have until someone devises a theory that combines general relativity and
quantum mechanics.
The properties of space-time between the two event horizons allow objects to
move only towards the singularity.
But the properties of space-time within the inner event horizon allow objects
to move away from the singularity, pass through another set of inner and outer
event horizons, and emerge out of the black hole into another universe or
another part of this universe without traveling faster than the speed of light.
Passing through the ring shaped singularity may allow entry to a negative
gravity universe.[12]
If this is true, rotating black holes could theoretically provide the wormholes which
often appear in science fiction. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that the internal properties
of a rotating black hole are exactly as described by Kerr's solution[13] and it is not
currently known whether the actual properties of a rotating black hole would provide
a similar escape route for an object via the inner event horizon.
Even if this escape route is possible, it is unlikely to be useful because a spacecraft
which followed that path would probably be distorted beyond recognition by
spaghettification.
Spaghettification
Main article: spaghettification
An object in any very strong gravitational field feels a tidal force stretching it in the
direction of the object generating the gravitational field. This is because the inverse
square law causes nearer parts of the stretched object to feel a stronger attraction than
farther parts. Near black holes, the tidal force is expected to be strong enough to
deform any object falling into it, even atoms or composite nucleons; this is called
spaghettification.
The strength of the tidal force depends on how gravitational attraction changes with
distance, rather than on the absolute force being felt. This means that small black
holes cause spaghettification while infalling objects are still outside their event
horizons, whereas objects falling into large, supermassive black holes may not be
deformed or otherwise feel excessively large forces before passing the event horizon.
From the viewpoint of a distant observer, an object falling into a black hole appears to
slow down, approaching but never quite reaching the event horizon: and it appears to
become redder and dimmer, because of the extreme gravitational red shift caused by
the gravity of the black hole. Eventually, the falling object becomes so dim that it can
no longer be seen, at a point just before it reaches the event horizon. All of this is a
consequence of time dilation: the object's movement is one of the processes that
appear to run slower and slower, and the time dilation effect is more significant than
the acceleration due to gravity; the frequency of light from the object appears to
decrease, making it look redder, because the light appears to complete fewer cycles
per "tick" of the observer's clock; lower-frequency light has less energy and therefore
appears dimmer, as well as redder.
From the viewpoint of the falling object, distant objects generally appear blue-shifted
due the gravitational field of the black hole. This effect may be partly (or even
entirely) negated by the red shift caused by the velocity of the infalling object with
respect to the object in the distance.
it is lost to the outside universe. An observer far from the hole simply sees the hole's
mass, charge, and angular momentum change slightly, to reflect the addition of the
infalling object's matter. After the event horizon all is unknown. Anything that passes
this point cannot be retrieved to study.
This modification of the Schwarzschild (a=0) result is not significant until a/M
becomes very close to unity. For this reason, good estimates can be made in many
astrophysical scenarios with a ignored.
Stars undergo gravitational collapse when they can no longer resist the pressure of
their own gravity. This usually occurs either because a star has too little "fuel" left to
maintain its temperature, or because a star which would have been stable receives a
lot of extra matter in a way which does not raise its core temperature. In either case
the star's temperature is no longer high enough to prevent it from collapsing under its
own weight (the ideal gas law explains the connection between pressure, temperature,
and volume).
The collapse transforms the matter in the star's core into a denser state which forms
one of the types of compact star. Which type of compact star is formed depends on the
mass of the remnant - the matter left over after changes triggered by the collapse
(such as supernova or pulsations leading to a planetary nebula) have blown away the
outer layers. Note that this can be substantially less than the original star - remnants
exceeding 5 solar masses are produced by stars which were over 20 solar masses
before the collapse.
Only the largest remnants, those exceeding a particular limit (the TolmanOppenheimer-Volkoff limit, not to be confused with the Chandrasekhar limit),
generate enough pressure to produce black holes, because black holes are the most
radically transformed state of matter known to physics, and the force which resists
this level of compression, neutron degeneracy pressure, is extremely strong. But any
remnant larger than the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit will never be able to stop
collapsing, and when its outer radius falls below its Schwarzschild radius, the
transition to black hole is complete.
The collapse process for stars producing remnants this size releases energy which
usually produces a supernova, blowing the star's outer layers into space so that they
form a spectacular nebula (this sort of nebula is called a supernova remnant). But the
supernova is a side-effect and does not directly contribute to producing the black hole
(or other type of compact star). For example a few gamma ray bursts were expected to
be followed by evidence of supernovae but this evidence did not appear.[16][17] One
possible explanation is that some very large stars can form black holes fast enough to
swallow the supernova blast wave before it can reach the surface of the star.
Stellar-mass black holes may act as "seeds" which grow by absorbing mass
from interstellar gas and dust, stars and planets or smaller black holes.
Star clusters of large total mass may be merged into single bodies by their
members' gravitational attraction. This will usually produce a supergiant or
hypergiant star which runs short of "fuel" in a few million years and then
undergoes gravitational collapse, produces a supernova or hypernova and
spends the rest of its existence as a black hole.
Evaporation
Hawking radiation is a theoretical process by which black holes can evaporate into
nothing. As there is no experimental evidence to corroborate it and there are still some
major questions about the theoretical basis of the process, there is still debate about
whether Hawking radiation can enable black holes to evaporate.
Quantum mechanics says that even the purest vacuum is not completely empty but is
instead a "sea" of energy (known as zero-point energy) which has wave-like
Fluctuation (thermodynamics). We cannot observe this "sea" of energy directly
because there is no lower energy level with which we can compare it. The Heisenberg
uncertainty principle dictates that it is impossible to know the exact value of the massenergy and position pairings. The fluctuations in this sea produce pairs of particles in
which one is made of normal matter and the other is the corresponding antiparticle
(special relativity proves mass-energy equivalence, i.e. that mass can be converted
into energy and vice versa). Normally each would soon meet another instance of its
antiparticle and the two would be totally converted into energy, restoring the overall
matter-energy balance as it was before the pair of particles was created. The Hawking
radiation theory suggests that, if such a pair of particles is created just outside the
event horizon of a black hole, one of the two particles may fall into the black hole
while the other escapes, because the two particles move in slightly different directions
after their creation. From the point of view of an outside observer, the black hole has
just emitted a particle and therefore the black hole has lost a minute amount of its
mass.
If the Hawking radiation theory is correct, only the very smallest black holes are
likely to evaporate in this way. For example a black hole with the mass of our Moon
would gain as much energy (and therefore mass - mass-energy equivalence again)
from cosmic microwave background radiation as it emits by Hawking radiation, and
larger black holes will gain more energy (and mass) than they emit. To put this in
perspective, the smallest black hole which can be created naturally at present is about
5 times the mass of our sun, so most black holes have much greater mass than our
Moon.
Over time the cosmic microwave background radiation becomes weaker. Eventually it
will be weak enough so that more Hawking radiation will be emitted than the energy
of the background radiation being absorbed by the black hole. Through this process,
even the largest black holes will eventually evaporate. However, this process may take
nearly a googol years to complete.
Intense but one-time gamma ray bursts (GRBs) may signal the birth of "new" black
holes, because astrophysicists think that GRBs are caused either by the gravitational
collapse of giant stars[18] or by collisions between neutron stars,[15] and both types of
event involve sufficient mass and pressure to produce black holes. But it appears that
a collision between a neutron star and a black hole can also cause a GRB,[19] so a GRB
is not proof that a "new" black hole has been formed. All known GRBs come from
outside our own galaxy, and most come from billions of light years away[20] so the
black holes associated with them are actually billions of years old.
Some astrophysicists believe that some ultraluminous X-ray sources may be the
accretion disks of intermediate-mass black holes.[21]
Quasars are thought to be the accretion disks of supermassive black holes, since no
other known object is powerful enough to produce such strong emissions. Quasars
produce strong emission across the electromagnetic spectrum, including UV, X-rays
and gamma-rays and are visible at tremendous distances due to their high luminosity.
Between 5 and 25% of quasars are "radio loud," so called because of their powerful
radio emission.[22]
Gravitational lensing
Gravitational lensing distorts the image around a black hole in front of the Large
Magellanic Cloud (simulated view)
A gravitational lens is formed when the light from a very distant, bright source (such
as a quasar) is "bent" around a massive object (such as a black hole) between the
source object and the observer. The process is known as gravitational lensing, and is
one of the predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. According to
this theory, mass "warps" space-time to create gravitational fields and therefore bend
light as a result.
A source image behind the lens may appear as multiple images to the observer. In
cases where the source, massive lensing object, and the observer lie in a straight line,
the source will appear as a ring behind the massive object.
Gravitational lensing can be caused by objects other than black holes, because any
very strong gravitational field will bend light rays. Some of these multiple-image
effects are probably produced by distant galaxies.
The radius of the central object round which the observed object is orbiting
must be less than the radius of the orbit, otherwise the two objects would
collide.
The orbital period and the radius of the orbit make it easy to calculate the
centrifugal force created by the orbiting object. Strictly speaking, the
centrifugal force also depends on the orbiting object's mass, but the next two
steps show why we can get away with pretending this is a fixed number: e.g.,
1.
The gravitational attraction between the central object and the orbiting object
must be exactly equal to the centrifugal force, otherwise the orbiting body
would either spiral into the central object or drift away.
The required gravitational attraction depends on the mass of the central object,
the mass of the orbiting object, and the radius of the orbit. But we can simplify
the calculation of both the centrifugal force and the gravitational attraction by
pretending that the mass of the orbiting object is the same fixed number: e.g.,
1. This makes it very easy to calculate the mass of the central object.
If the Schwarzschild radius for a body with the mass of the central object is
greater than the maximum radius of the central object, the central object must
be a black hole whose event horizon's radius is equal to the Schwarzschild
radius.
Unfortunately, since the time of Johannes Kepler, astronomers have had to deal with
the complications of real astronomy:
Quasi-periodic oscillations can be used to determine the mass of Black Holes.[23] The
technique uses a relationship between black holes and the inner part of their
surrounding disks, where gas spirals inward before reaching the event horizon. As the
gas collapses inwards, it radiates X-rays with an intensity that varies in a pattern that
repeats itself over a nearly regular interval. This signal is the Quasi-Periodic
Oscillation, or QPO. A QPOs frequency depends on the black holes mass; the event
horizon lies close in for small black holes, so the QPO has a higher frequency. For
black holes with a larger mass, the event horizon is farther out, so the QPO frequency
is lower.
The jet originating from the center of M87 in this image comes from an active
galactic nucleus that may contain a supermassive black hole. Credit: Hubble Space
Telescope/NASA/ESA.
According to the American Astronomical Society, every large galaxy has a
supermassive black hole at its center. The black holes mass is proportional to the
mass of the host galaxy, suggesting that the two are linked very closely. The Hubble
and ground-based telescopes in Hawaii were used in a large survey of galaxies.
For decades, astronomers have used the term "active galaxy" to describe galaxies with
unusual characteristics, such as unusual spectral line emission and very strong radio
emission.[24][25] However, theoretical and observational studies have shown that the
active galactic nuclei (AGN) in these galaxies may contain supermassive black holes.
[24][25]
The models of these AGN consist of a central black hole that may be millions or
billions of times more massive than the Sun; a disk of gas and dust called an accretion
disk; and two jets that are perpendicular to the accretion disk.[25]
Although supermassive black holes are expected to be found in most AGN, only some
galaxies' nuclei have been more carefully studied in attempts to both identify and
measure the actual masses of the central supermassive black hole candidates. Some of
the most notable galaxies with supermassive black hole candidates include the
Andromeda Galaxy, M32, M87, NGC 3115, NGC 3377, NGC 4258, and the
Sombrero Galaxy.[26]
Astronomers are confident that our own Milky Way galaxy has a supermassive black
hole at its center, in a region called Sagittarius A*:
A star called S2 (star) follows an elliptical orbit with a period of 15.2 years
and a pericenter (closest) distance of 17 light hours from the central object.
The first estimates indicated that the central object contains 2.6M (2.6 million)
solar masses and has a radius of less than 17 light hours. Only a black hole can
contain such a vast mass in such a small volume.
Further observations[27] strengthened the case for a black hole, by showing that
the central object's mass is about 3.7M solar masses and its radius no more
than 6.25 light-hours.
Artist's impression of a binary system consisting of a black hole and a main sequence
star. The black hole is drawing matter from the main sequence star via an accretion
disk around it, and some of this matter forms a gas jet.
Our Milky Way galaxy contains several probable stellar-mass black holes which are
closer to us than the supermassive black hole in the Sagittarius A* region. These
candidates are all members of X-ray binary systems in which the denser object draws
matter from its partner via an accretion disk. The probable black holes in these pairs
range from three to more than a dozen solar masses.[33][34] The most distant stellarmass black hole ever observed is a member of a binary system located in the Messier
33 galaxy.[35]
This assumes that light is influenced by gravity in the same way as massive objects.
In 1796, the mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace promoted the same idea in the first
and second editions of his book Exposition du systme du Monde (it was removed
from later editions).
The idea of black holes was largely ignored in the nineteenth century, since light was
then thought to be a massless wave and therefore not influenced by gravity. Unlike a
modern black hole, the object behind the horizon is assumed to be stable against
collapse.
In 1963 Roy Kerr extended Finkelstein's analysis by presenting the Kerr metric
(coordinates) and showing how this made it possible to predict the properties of
rotating black holes.[42] In addition to its theoretical interest, Kerr's work made black
holes more believable for astronomers, since black holes are formed from stars and all
known stars rotate.
In 1967 astronomers discovered pulsars, and within a few years could show that the
known pulsars were rapidly rotating neutron stars. Until that time, neutron stars were
also regarded as just theoretical curiosities. So the discovery of pulsars awakened
interest in all types of ultra-dense objects that might be formed by gravitational
collapse.
In December 1967 the theoretical physicist John Wheeler coined the expression
"black hole" in his public lecture Our Universe: the Known and Unknown, and this
mysterious, slightly menacing phrase attracted more attention than the static-sounding
"frozen star". The phrase was probably coined with the awareness of the Black Hole
of Calcutta incident of 1756 in which 146 Europeans were locked up overnight in
punishment cell of barracks at Fort William by Siraj ud-Daulah, and all but 23
perished.[43]
In 1970, Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose proved that black holes are a feature of
all solutions to Einstein's equations of gravity, not just of Schwarzschild's, and
therefore black holes cannot be avoided in some collapsing objects.[44]
There is a theoretical possibility that a micro black hole might be created inside a
particle accelerator.[48] Formation of black holes under these conditions (below the
Planck energy) requires non-standard assumptions, such as large extra dimensions.
However, many particle collisions that naturally occur as the cosmic rays hit the edge
of our atmosphere are often far more energetic than any collisions created by man. If
micro black holes can be created by current or next-generation particle accelerators,
they have probably been created by cosmic rays every day throughout most of Earth's
history, i.e. for billions of years, evidently without earth-destroying effects. However,
such natural micro black holes would be relativistic relative to earth, and should zip
safely through our planet in 1/4 second or less at 99.99+% c. Collider produced micro
black holes would be relatively "at rest" where they could become gravitationally
bound, affording repeated opportunity to interact and grow larger, travelling at a tiny
fraction of c, if Hawking Radiation is not real. This distinction between nature-made
and man-made micro black holes has not yet been addressed in any of the safety
studies on potential collider production of micro black holes.
If two protons at the Large Hadron Collider could merge to create a micro black hole,
this black hole would be unstable, and would evaporate due to Hawking radiation
before it had a chance to propagate. For a 14 TeV black hole (the center-of-mass
energy at the Large Hadron Collider), the Hawking radiation formula indicates that it
would evaporate in 10-100 seconds.
CERN conducted a study assessing the risk of producing dangerous objects such as
black holes at the Large Hadron Collider, and concluded that there is "no basis for any
conceivable threat."[49] However, due to renewed concerns about both potential
negative strangelet production, and LHC micro black holes that are "at rest" compared
to natural micro black holes that are relativistic, CERN commissioned another study
in 2007, with the results to be published in early 2008. Essentially, the concern is that
due to their tiny size, a relativistic micro black hole would barely interact while
traversing earth, being very similar to a neutrino in having a low cross-section for
interaction, and therefore harmless. Conversely, the relatively slow speed of colliderproduced micro black holes and their gravitational binding to earth would allow for
repeated opportunity to interact with matter, eventually allowing such micro black
hole to grow larger. These speculative scenarios also require that theoretical Hawking
Radiation is not real.
Alternative models
Main article: Nonsingular black hole models
Several alternative models, which behave like a black hole but avoid the singularity,
have been proposed. However, most researchers judge these concepts artificial, as
they are more complicated but do not give near term observable differences from
black holes (see Occam's razor). The most prominent alternative theory is the
Gravastar.
In March 2005, physicist George Chapline at the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory in California proposed that black holes do not exist, and that objects
currently thought to be black holes are actually dark-energy stars. He draws this
conclusion from some quantum mechanical analyses. Although his proposal currently
has little support in the physics community, it was widely reported by the media.[50][51]
A similar theory about the non-existence of black holes was later developed by a
group of physicists at Case Western Reserve University in June 2007.[52]
Among the alternate models are magnetospheric eternally collapsing objects, clusters
of elementary particles[53] (e.g., boson stars[54]), fermion balls,[55] self-gravitating,
degenerate heavy neutrinos[56] and even clusters of very low mass (~0.04 solar mass)
black holes.[53]
would rapidly become significant for hypothetical smaller black holes, where
quantum-mechanical effects dominate. Indeed, small black holes are predicted to
undergo runaway evaporation and eventually vanish in a burst of radiation.
outside, information is never actually destroyed, as matter falling into the black hole
takes an infinite time to reach the event horizon.
Ideas about quantum gravity, on the other hand, suggest that there can only be a
limited finite entropy (i.e. a maximum finite amount of information) associated with
the space near the horizon; but the change in the entropy of the horizon plus the
entropy of the Hawking radiation is always sufficient to take up all of the entropy of
matter and energy falling into the black hole.
Many physicists are concerned however that this is still not sufficiently well
understood. In particular, at a quantum level, is the quantum state of the Hawking
radiation uniquely determined by the history of what has fallen into the black hole;
and is the history of what has fallen into the black hole uniquely determined by the
quantum state of the black hole and the radiation? This is what determinism, and
unitarity, would require.
For a long time Stephen Hawking had opposed such ideas, holding to his original
1975 position that the Hawking radiation is entirely thermal and therefore entirely
random, containing none of the information held in material the hole has swallowed in
the past; this information he reasoned had been lost. However, on 21 July 2004 he
presented a new argument, reversing his previous position.[59] On this new calculation,
the entropy (and hence information) associated with the black hole escapes in the
Hawking radiation itself, although making sense of it, even in principle, is still
difficult until the black hole completes its evaporation; until then it is impossible to
relate in a 1:1 way the information in the Hawking radiation (embodied in its detailed
internal correlations) to the initial state of the system. Once the black hole evaporates
completely, then such an identification can be made, and unitarity is preserved.
By the time Hawking completed his calculation, it was already very clear from the
AdS/CFT correspondence that black holes decay in a unitary way. This is because the
fireballs in gauge theories, which are analogous to Hawking radiation are
unquestionably unitary. Hawking's new calculation have not really been evaluated by
the specialist scientific community, because the methods he uses are unfamiliar and of
dubious consistency; but Hawking himself found it sufficiently convincing to pay out
on a bet he had made in 1997 with Caltech physicist John Preskill, to considerable
media interest.
,
where
According to general relativity, a gravitating object will collapse into a black hole if
its radius is smaller than a characteristic distance, known as the Schwarzschild radius.
(Indeed, Buchdahl's theorem in general relativity shows that in the case of a perfect
fluid model of a compact object, the true lower limit is somewhat larger than the
Schwarzschild radius.) Below this radius, spacetime is so strongly curved that any
light ray emitted in this region, regardless of the direction in which it is emitted, will
travel towards the centre of the system. Because relativity forbids anything from
traveling faster than light, anything below the Schwarzschild radius including the
constituent particles of the gravitating object will collapse into the centre. A
gravitational singularity, a region of theoretically infinite density, forms at this point.
Because not even light can escape from within the Schwarzschild radius, a classical
black hole would truly appear black.
The Schwarzschild radius is given by
where G is the gravitational constant, m is the mass of the object, and c is the speed of
light. For an object with the mass of the Earth, the Schwarzschild radius is a mere 9
millimeters about the size of a marble.
The mean density inside the Schwarzschild radius decreases as the mass of the black
hole increases, so while an earth-mass black hole would have a density of
2 1030 kg/m, a supermassive black hole of 109 solar masses has a density of around
20 kg/m, less than water! The mean density is given by
Since the Earth has a mean radius of 6371 km, its volume would have to be reduced 4
1026 times to collapse into a black hole. For an object with the mass of the Sun, the
Schwarzschild radius is approximately 3 km, much smaller than the Sun's current
radius of about 696,000 km. It is also significantly smaller than the radius to which
the Sun will ultimately shrink after exhausting its nuclear fuel, which is several
thousand kilometers. More massive stars can collapse into black holes at the end of
their lifetimes.
The formula also implies that any object with a given mean density is a black hole if
its radius is large enough. The same formula applies for white holes as well. For
example, if the observable universe has a mean density equal to the critical density,
then it is a white hole, since its singularity is in the past and not in the future as should
be for a black hole.
Where A is the area of the event horizon of the black hole, is Dirac's constant (the
"reduced Planck constant"), k is the Boltzmann constant, G is the gravitational
constant, c is the speed of light and S is the entropy.
A convenient length scale to measure black hole processes is the "gravitational
radius", which is equal to
When expressed in terms of this length scale, many phenomena appear at integer
radii. For example, the radius of a Schwarzschild black hole is two gravitational radii
and the radius of a maximally rotating Kerr black hole is one gravitational radius. The
location of the light circularization radius around a Schwarzschild black hole (where
light may orbit the hole in an unstable circular orbit) is 3rG. The location of the
marginally stable orbit, thought to be close to the inner edge of an accretion disk, is at
6rG for a Schwarzschild black hole.
References
1. ^ "Step by Step into a Black Hole".
2. ^ NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center: "Gamma-rays
from Black Holes and Neutron Stars".
3. ^ Max-Planck-Gesellschaft October 28, 2006,
"Discovery Of Gamma Rays From The Edge Of A Black
Hole".
4. ^ Milky Way Black Hole May Be a Colossal 'Particle
Accelerator'.
123: 1111-1148.
19. ^ Lattimer, J. M. and Schramm, D. N. (1976). "The
tidal disruption of neutron stars by black holes in close
binaries". Astrophysical Journal 210: 549.
20. ^ Paczynski, B. (1995). "How Far Away Are GammaRay Bursters?". Publications of the Astronomical
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
494: L181L184.
54. ^ Torres, Diego F.; S. Capozziello, G. Lambiase
(2000). A supermassive boson star at the galactic
center?. Retrieved on 2006-03-25.
55. ^ Munyaneza, F.; R.D. Viollier (2001). The motion of
stars near the Galactic center: A comparison of the black
hole and fermion ball scenarios. Retrieved on 2006-03-
25.
56. ^ Tsiklauri, David; Raoul D. Viollier (1998). Dark
matter concentration in the galactic center. Retrieved on
2006-03-25.
57. ^ Stephen Hawking A Brief History of Time, 1998,
ISBN 0-553-38016-8
Further reading
Popular reading
Ferguson, Kitty (1991). Black Holes in Space-Time. Watts Franklin. ISBN 0531-12524-6.
Hawking, Stephen (1998). A Brief History of Time. Bantam Books, Inc. ISBN
0-553-38016-8.
Melia, Fulvio (2003). The Black Hole at the Center of Our Galaxy. Princeton
U Press. ISBN 978-0-691-09505-9.
Melia, Fulvio (2003). The Edge of Infinity. Supermassive Black Holes in the
Universe. Cambridge U Press. ISBN 978-0-521-81405-8.
Pickover, Clifford (1998). Black Holes: A Traveler's Guide. Wiley, John &
Sons, Inc. ISBN 0-471-19704-1.
Thorne, Kip S. (1994). Black Holes and Time Warps. Norton, W. W. &
Company, Inc. ISBN 0-393-31276-3.
Carter, B. (1973). Black hole equilibrium states, in Black Holes, eds. DeWitt
B. S. and DeWitt C.
Chandrasekhar, Subrahmanyan (1999). Mathematical Theory of Black Holes.
Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-850370-9.
Frolov, V. P. and Novikov, I. D. (1998), Black hole physics.
Hawking, S. W. and Ellis, G. F. R. (1973), The large-scale structure of spacetime, Cambridge University Press.
Melia, Fulvio (2007). The Galactic Supermassive Black Hole. Princeton U
Press. ISBN 978-0-691-13129-0.
Taylor, Edwin F.; Wheeler, John Archibald (2000). Exploring Black Holes.
Addison Wesley Longman. ISBN 0-201-38423-X.
Thorne, Kip S.; Misner, Charles; Wheeler, John (1973). Gravitation. W. H.
Freeman and Company. ISBN 0-7167-0344-0.
Wald, Robert M. (1992). Space, Time, and Gravity: The Theory of the Big
Bang and Black Holes. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-87029-4.
Research papers
Hawking, S. W. (July 2005), Information Loss in Black Holes, arxiv:hepth/0507171. Stephen Hawking's purported solution to the black hole unitarity
paradox, first reported at a conference in July 2004.
Ghez, A.M. et al. Stellar orbits around the Galactic Center black hole,
Astrophysics J. 620 (2005). arXiv:astro-ph/0306130 More accurate mass and
position for the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way.
Hughes, S. A. Trust but verify: the case for astrophysical black holes,
arXiv:hep-ph/0511217. Lecture notes from 2005 SLAC Summer Institute.
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