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from the two-steps-forward-and-there's-no-turning-back dept.
Are black holes the ruthless killers we’ve made them out to be? Samir Mathur says no. According to the professor of physics at Ohio State University, the recently-proposed idea that black holes have “firewalls” that destroy all they touch has a loophole.
In a paper posted online to the arXiv preprint server, Mathur takes issue with the firewall theory, and proves mathematically that black holes are not necessarily arbiters of doom. In fact, he says the world could be captured by a black hole, and we wouldn’t even notice.
More than a decade ago, Mathur used the principles of string theory to show that black holes are actually tangled-up balls of cosmic strings. His “fuzzball theory” helped resolve certain contradictions in how physicists think of black holes.
But when a group of researchers recently tried to build on Mathur’s theory, they concluded that the surface of the fuzzball was actually a firewall.
According to the firewall theory, the surface of the fuzzball is deadly. In fact, the idea is called the firewall theory because it suggests that a very literal fiery death awaits anything that touches it.
Mathur and his team have been expanding on their fuzzball theory, too, and they’ve come to a completely different conclusion. They see black holes not as killers, but rather as benign copy machines of a sort.
https://news.osu.edu/news/2015/06/16/fuzzyhologram/
Original Submission
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday June 18 2015, @08:16PM
So it's space that causes mass, not mass deforming space, mmm?
Then what about the other properties: momentum, charge, etc.? Since everything is blocked by the horizon, you say except the size of the horizon there should be no difference between the Sagittarius black hole and the (hypothetical) black hole created by squeezing a proton beyond its schwarzschild radius (forget the evaporation rate, consider only the charge, spin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Absolutely.Geek on Thursday June 18 2015, @09:03PM
a black hole is supposed to have a singularity at it centre, right? Like a point of infinite gravity, isn't it? Then how come two different singularities can have a different attributes, like mass, size, momentum etc?
In the most basic terms density and mass are not the same thing.
If the sun were to turn into a black hole; we here on earth would notice no difference (except for the strange lack of light); an event horizon would exist because the density of the singularity, that harizon would be well inside the current radius of the sun. Black holes can have differnet masses and therefore momentum because the matter that went into making them up had a specific amount of mass. Because the masses of black holes are different that means that the raduis of the event horizon will be different for every black hole.
everybody* looks for gravitational waves, 'cause, you know, nothing can go faster then light - so there should be waves. Suppose you throw another small black-hole into a huge one: that should show a notable perturbation in the gravity of the receiver, except this info can't get out.
Ok lets suppose that you have a "small" black hole; any small object that is a stable black hole already has many solar masses of stuff trapped in there; and you throw it at a "big" black hole. It is much more interesting if the black holes are similar masses for the same reason that hitting a marble with a marble produces more intersting results the hitting a car with a marble.
But ok we have two black holes traveling towards each other; first thing well before the event horizons get close they are interacting with their regular gravitational fields. Thus the path of both holes is being modified well before they are close; if you get lucky and they are perfectly aligned the small hole will merge with the large hole and there will be a massive release of energy in the form of gravity waves rippling out from the point of the merger; the resultant now more massive black hole will travel in the direction of the larger black holes original path.
The more likely outcome (assuming they come "close") is that they are not traveling exactly opposite directions and they endup orbiting each other for a time; in this situation the smaller black hole eventually spirals into the the entire time energy is being released as gravity waves because space-time is being dragged around by these huge objects.
The third option is that the black holes are "far" apart; the two black holes trasnfer some momentum (gravity boost) and the smaller black hole possibly achieves escape velocity and leaves the galaxy, or it trasnfers momentum the other way the big hole spees up slightly and the smaller hole slows down a lot and falls towards the centre of the galaxy.
Don't trust the police or the government - Shihad: My mind's sedate.