Physics 5-9-18

General Relativity: Relativity is Geometry

Astrophysicists think that black holes exist…
“As you see, the war treated me kindly enough, in spite of the heavy gunfire, to allow
me to get away from it all and take this walk in the land of your ideas” -Karl
Schwarzschild to Einstein

WHAT ARE BLACK HOLES?

Anatomy of Schwarzschild Black Hole
– Rs = (2GM)/c^2
– Rs is the Schwarzschild radius
– G is a gravitational constant
– M is the mass of the blackhole
– c is the speed of light
Black Holes in General Relativity
– Event horizon: the point of no return, roughly the Schwarzschild radius
– Singularity: where spacetime is so extremely curved that our known laws
breakdown
– Mass, spin, charge: the 3 numbers that fully describe black holes
– Empty: black holes represent vacuum spacetime. There is no “stuff” in black holes
Black hole = object smaller than its Schwarzschild radius
– Rs = (2GM)/c^2
≈ 1.5 x 10^-27 (M/kg) meters

Schwarzschild radius of the sun —> 2 x 10^30 kg ≈ 3km

Schwarzschild radius of the earth —> 6 x 10^24 kg ≈ 3cm

DO BLACK HOLES REALLY EXIST?

For the colorful history of black holes though the eyes of one of its spiritual and
intellectual leaders

How does one make a black hole?

– pack a lot of stuff into a VERY small region
Astrophysicists know that “black holes” exist.
– A wide array of astronomical observations point to the existence of a very massive
and highly compact objects in the cosmos
How do we see black holes?
– We generally have look at the black hole’s environment
Cygnus X1, the “first” black hole
– Strong x-ray radiation discovered in 1971
– Belong to an x-ray binary with a blue supergiant star
– Light intensity varies on the order of a millisecond; source can’t be larger than
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300km
– 15 times the mass of the sun
Quasars and Active Galactic Nuclei
– very powerful sources from very far away
– Billions of times more massive than the sun
– Relativistic jet spewing out straight for several thousands of light years
Black holes can be very bright (brightest objects in the universe) because of it’s very
strong gravitational force, it burns out things around it.

SgrA* (Saguitarius A), our galactic black hole

– inactive
– mass inferred from stellar orbits
– To be imaged by Event Horizon Telescope in 2017
The Black Hole Hypothesis explains the observations:
– large energy output
– rapid motion of surrounding stars and gas
– Rapid spectral variability
– Presence of relativistic jets
* this points the existence of a very heavy and highly compact (spinning) objects
throughout the cosmos
We can hear black holes!
– Gravitational waves
Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory
– L-configuration
– 4km tubes where a laser bounces off mirrors
– Very sensitive devices for the change of distance
– A key in studying gravitational waves and other types of waves
* Light is caused by any electromagnetic wave that accelerates = Moving masses is
what causes gravitational waves
GW150914: The first detection of a black hole
– not enough to see a signal, the signals must be identical (signals in DC and
Louisiana were the same)
– What have we learned?
○ Black holes are real
○ Gravitational waves are real. We heard one which travelled 1.3 billion years to
reach us.
○ Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity seems to be working beautifully. The
detection provides strongest confirmation of dynamical gravity work
Reiss, Thorne, Drever
– Sir’s prediction for Nobel Prize in Physics 2017?
– Drever passed away in 2016
Masses in Stellar Graveyard

WHY ARE BLACK HOLES IMPORTANT?

“Physics is like sex: Sure it may give practical results, but that’s not why we do it.” -
Richard Feyman
“The black holes of nature are the most perfect macroscopic there are in the universe;
the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time… They are
the simplest objects as well.” -Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar