A ring singularity could provide a gateway to other universes (as in the 1994 sci-fi novel "Ring," by Stephen Baxter, published by HarperCollins). That means the singularity could, if it rotates fast enough, becomes a ring, rather than a point. Realistically, any object in space tends to rotate. It gets even weirder when you realize that black holes aren't static. However, nobody has worked out a way to make quantum mechanical theory work with gravity, to figure out what a singularity might look like. These singularities are also very small, and at that point, one should see quantum mechanical effects. Scientists use Einstein's theory of relativity to describe the curving of space, but Einstein's equations start to break down in the singularities of black holes. Instead of a depression, you just have a hole whose sides get steeper as you go toward the center, until they are basically vertical and space is shaped like an infinitely stretched dimple.Īnd that's why it's a mystery. The curvature of space just keeps going up and up until you reach the singularity at the center of the black hole, where that curvature is infinite. Using the mat analogy, any normal object would have a well shaped like a depression with a finite depth.īlack holes don't behave like normal objects … perhaps fortunate for the trapped individual. A planet, for example, has a gravity well, but as you go toward the center of a planetary sphere, the well flattens out. (Think of a sumo wrestler rolling on a mat, indenting the mat with his weight.) Any object creates a local "gravity well." That well gets deeper toward the center of the object. There might be a better way out of a black hole, though: Gravity bends space. There's some debate in the scientific community about how long it takes for a black hole to evaporate, because the Hawking radiation doesn't preserve any information about the stuff that fell into the black hole in the first place but the fact remains that being emitted as radiation is still not good. The universe is about 14 billion years old, or 1.4 x 10^9 years. Ī black hole with the mass of the sun - by cosmic standards that's a small one - takes on the order of 10^87 years to evaporate and turn into a burst of gamma-rays. Black holes eventually evaporate, but you would be waiting around a long time for that to happen. In doing so, the black holes lose mass, because according to Einstein's famous E = mc^2 equation, energy and mass are equivalent. Physicist Stephen Hawking's calculations showed that black holes give off photons. Your matter would then add to the radius of the black hole's event horizon.Įventually you'd be emitted as Hawking radiation. If you were to fall into a black hole, the usual description of such an event says that you would first get stretched into spaghetti by tidal forces, then crushed into nothingness. All the matter from whatever originally supplied the black hole's mass (a star, for example) gets crushed into a point that has infinite density. Remember that most scientists think a black hole is a singularity. What's inside that surface is one of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics. This illustration shows a black hole named Cygnus X-1, which is sucking the life out of a blue star beside it.
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