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Why cant black holes have mass?

Urge

Lieutenant Commander
Red Shirt
Isnt it possible that black holes have physical mass, and that this ball of mass followes the same rules as other balls of mass?

I prefer such a idea to all this worm-hole, singularity, "smaller then an atom" thing that Hawkings and a bunch of other people are messing up their brains with.

Star collapses, mass is compressed to something very dense and heavy (The atoms split up in the process) and this dense and heavy thing is unable to create something heavier through fusion, because it has come to the end of the game in a way, producing a form of mass way heavier than anything we have on our periodic table.

Therefor it becomes very cold, and very flat. No mountains or hills or anything - completely and absolutely round, flat one might say - if one stands on the surface. It also becomes very dark because it swallows sunlight - and this might heat up the surface a bit never the less? Or is it impossible for mass without things like nucleus and electrons to become heated? It might be that the particles that its made up from are packed to densely to allow any kind of movement so it stays cold.

Anyway, this cold, hard and flat place sucks in more mass, but when the mass slams into the surface it starts a heavy fusion-process that releases a lot of energy, until it have become more of the super-heavy stuff.

Couldnt such a mass-based black hole theory also work? Why do we have to make them so small and wierd? And why do people believe that the gravitational pull can exist without the heavy mass in the midle, so that you can drive through it and push your self out on the other side worm-hole style?

The funny thing is off course this high-speed-slow-time that Einstein found out. Things gets accelerated on their way down, and then they end up using more of our time on their way down. Does this make black holes eat more slowly than they otherwise would have done?
 
You've pretty much just described a neutron star. (except light can escape a neutron star) The only way for something to capture light using gravity is to have Black holes as they are currently described using modern physics.
 
I was just gonna say, "Isn't that basically a neutron star?"

Question: if a neutron star's gravity pulls in too much stuff, could it become too massive and turn into a blackhole?
 
Err, of course black holes do have mass. That's what generate their gravitational pull.

At the best of my knowledge, black holes have mass but no physical extension, thus leading to "infinite density" (the whole singularity stuff). If anyone ever told you that black holes don't have mass, they were clearly wrong.

Couldnt such a mass-based black hole theory also work? Why do we have to make them so small and wierd? And why do people believe that the gravitational pull can exist without the heavy mass in the midle, so that you can drive through it and push your self out on the other side worm-hole style?
Mmh, that's science-fiction, not physics. There are some theoretical models of black holes that could maybe make room for wormhole-like travelling, but they are far from established. I think you are mixing up what sci-fi movies tell you for entertainment with textbook astrophysics.

The funny thing is off course this high-speed-slow-time that Einstein found out. Things gets accelerated on their way down, and then they end up using more of our time on their way down. Does this make black holes eat more slowly than they otherwise would have done?
I'm not sure I understand what you are talking about here.
 
How can a black hole have a gravitational field without mass? I'm pretty sure they have mass.

ETA: iguana beat me to it! :lol:
 
The funny thing is off course this high-speed-slow-time that Einstein found out. Things gets accelerated on their way down, and then they end up using more of our time on their way down. Does this make black holes eat more slowly than they otherwise would have done?
I'm not sure I understand what you are talking about here.

If I learned one thing from Stargate SG-1, it's that blackholes create a time-dilation field. :p
 
Well, of course there is time-dilation involved in stuff falling to the event horizon of a black hole, but I'm not sure what he meant with "they end up using more of our time on their way down".

If he simply meant that things appear (from out point of view) to approach the event horizon more and more slowly as they come near it (while, from their own point of view, they do not), this is in fact correct.
 
If I learned one thing from Stargate SG-1, it's that blackholes create a time-dilation field. :p
Actually, there is time dilation anywhere there is mass-energy. In fact, what we experience as gravity is time dilation, not curved space.

Lets, for example, negate the time aspect of gravity for the Earth for a moment. I hold out an object, make sure it is as still as possible, and let go. What happens? Nothing, it just sits there motionless. I grab the same object, but this time I throw it. What happens? Well, it is very hard to tell, but the path really isn't perfectly straight. Unfortunately the Earth doesn't curve space enough that we would see the curvature of the path.

Curved space doesn't create the force of gravity, time dilation does. The fact that as you get further away from the surface of the Earth, time passes a little faster. That means that while standing, your head is experiencing a different rate of time than your feet. It is that difference that makes it feel like we are in an accelerated reference frame... that the surface of the Earth is pushing up against us.

For us, Earth bound as we are, the active part of gravitation is time. You need much larger bodies (like the Sun) before the space aspect of gravitation starts to have a noticeable effect on things. And of course, the larger the body, the more noticeably space is effected.

One of the things that made Einstein so incredible was that he could visualize acceleration. It was this ability that let him do thought experiments that showed him general relativity before he had the math to fully explain it. He knew what gravity was (in a general sense) before what we know as general relativity today existed. And he was able to explain what he was seeing to others (to the point that David Hilbert was able to start applying math to the theory).

But yeah... time is what keeps us on the ground.
 
If he simply meant that things appear (from out point of view) to approach the event horizon more and more slowly as they come near it (while, from their own point of view, they do not), this is in fact correct.

Yes, that was what I meant.
 
Last month I read in a magazine on astronomy that some scientists holds open the possibility of so-called "black stars" where the event-horizon exist below the surface of the star, so that the surface itself is visible.

What kind of matter this surface would be made of (Quarks or Neutrons or something else) was not mentioned.

Anyway, I dont understand this singularity thing. Wouldnt it be natural to assume that black holes occupy space in the universe the same way stars and planets do?
 
Isnt it possible that black holes have physical mass, and that this ball of mass followes the same rules as other balls of mass?

As others have mentioned, black holes absolutely do have mass. They pretty much have nothing but mass. Mass is one of only about four measurable quantities a black hole can have, the others being charge, angular momentum, and the radius of the event horizon. And that fourth quantity is directly dependent on the mass, so that's really only three fundamental properties a black hole can have, with mass being the only one a black hole must have.


I prefer such a idea to all this worm-hole, singularity, "smaller then an atom" thing that Hawkings and a bunch of other people are messing up their brains with.

I'm not sure how you're defining "mass" if you think it's inconsistent with those ideas. I think you're referring to something that has physical extent, but that's not what mass means. Functionally, mass is an object's resistance to inertia, or the parameter that determines how much gravitational attraction it exerts upon other bodies. It's got nothing to do with how big an object is.



Star collapses, mass is compressed to something very dense and heavy (The atoms split up in the process) and this dense and heavy thing is unable to create something heavier through fusion, because it has come to the end of the game in a way, producing a form of mass way heavier than anything we have on our periodic table.

Uhh, it couldn't "create something heavier" in any way. Matter isn't created out of nothing. When a massive star collapses, most of its outer atmosphere is blown away in a supernova, and the remains of the core collapse to increasingly greater density, but the amount of material does not increase. I think you're using "heavy" where you should be using "dense." As an object of a certain mass decreases in volume, its density increases, like when you squish a sponge in your hand. The material gets compressed tighter. If there's enough gravity to overcome the repulsion of the atoms' electrons, it collapses to electron-degenerate matter, the stuff that white dwarfs (and probably Jupiter's core) are made of. The nuclei are jammed close together and the electrons form a sort of fluid shared by all of them. If the gravitational pull is even stronger, it collapses to the point that the electrons are forced into the protons, turning them into neutrons -- so you get neutron-degenerate matter, known in fiction as neutronium, the stuff that neutron stars are made of. Maybe you compress it enough that it becomes degenerate by one more stage, an undifferentiated mass of quarks (the elementary particles that protons and neutrons are made of), aka quark matter.

But if the gravity is strong enough even to overcome the repulsion between the quarks that allows them to exist as separate particles, then there's nothing to prevent it from being crushed down to an arbitrarily small size, small enough that the remaining mass becomes encased within an event horizon, since the gravity at the surface becomes so great that even light can't escape. Beyond that point, under classical or relativistic physics, there's nothing to stop collapse to infinitely small size, the point mass known as a singularity. Quantum physics suggests that singularities may not exist, that there's too much uncertainty at the microscopic level for anything to be compressed completely to zero size. However, it's still inside the event horizon, so it would look and act the same either way.


Therefor it becomes very cold, and very flat. No mountains or hills or anything - completely and absolutely round, flat one might say - if one stands on the surface. It also becomes very dark because it swallows sunlight - and this might heat up the surface a bit never the less? Or is it impossible for mass without things like nucleus and electrons to become heated? It might be that the particles that its made up from are packed to densely to allow any kind of movement so it stays cold.

Anyway, this cold, hard and flat place sucks in more mass, but when the mass slams into the surface it starts a heavy fusion-process that releases a lot of energy, until it have become more of the super-heavy stuff.

Yeah, you're more or less describing a neutron star here, except neutron stars start out extremely hot -- since they are, after all, collapsed stars, and stars are hot to begin with, and when you increase the density of something, you increase its temperature.

Couldnt such a mass-based black hole theory also work? Why do we have to make them so small and wierd? And why do people believe that the gravitational pull can exist without the heavy mass in the midle, so that you can drive through it and push your self out on the other side worm-hole style?

The mass is in the middle. All the mass is still there, just squished into a single point of infinite density (or as close to that as quantum uncertainty allows).

Now, normally, there's no wormhole. If the black hole is non-rotating and non-charged, the singularity is a point, and you just keep falling in toward it until you hit it. If it's rotating, however, the singularity becomes a ring, what's known as a Kerr singularity. Inside the ring, spacetime becomes so warped that you could conceivably pass through it and find yourself in some other part of time or space -- if the black hole is really large, like one at the center of a galaxy, so that the ring is big enough to pass through without being crushed by the immense gravity.

However, a wormhole per se isn't meant to be the exact same thing as a black hole, just something with similar properties. It was Einstein, along with Rosen and Podowlski, who first noted that the spacetime topology of a black hole -- which could be treated as an infinitely deep "well" in an infinite flat "surface" of spacetime -- was topologically equivalent to a "tube" connecting two infinite "surfaces" (i.e. you could stretch out the walls of the "well" into a flat sheet). So they concluded that if the laws of physics allowed a black hole to exist, they could also allow the existence of a "bridge" connecting two regions of space or time, aka an Einstein-Rosen bridge -- or, as John Wheeler dubbed it in the '60s, a wormhole. (Wheeler's also the guy who coined the name "black hole" in the '60s, though the concept had been around much earlier.)


The funny thing is off course this high-speed-slow-time that Einstein found out. Things gets accelerated on their way down, and then they end up using more of our time on their way down. Does this make black holes eat more slowly than they otherwise would have done?

There's no absolutely "right" measure of how fast time is flowing. Two observers who are moving differently relative to each other will measure the passage of time differently, but neither one can be said to be "right" or "wrong." They're both right within their own frames of reference. An outside observer will see something slowing down as it falls into a black hole, finally becoming frozen perpetually at the event horizon. But if you're the one actually falling in, you'll just see yourself falling through the horizon and toward the singularity. And you'll both be right.

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Anyway, I dont understand this singularity thing. Wouldnt it be natural to assume that black holes occupy space in the universe the same way stars and planets do?

Remember what I said about squishing a sponge? The more you squish it, the less space it occupies, even though the same amount of stuff is in it. If you could squish it to arbitrary density, it would occupy less and less space until it became a black hole with the mass of that sponge.
 
I can safely say that all of that went completely over my head.
Sorry about that... Every so often I get the wild idea that I can explain this stuff really clearly, and then when I start it turns out that I really can't. And all the while, I'm really wanting to share this with everyone.

You should see the look on my Dad's face as I try to explain it to him (over and over again).

But it is really cool stuff. I wouldn't keep trying every so often if it wasn't worth the effort.


Anyway, I dont understand this singularity thing. Wouldnt it be natural to assume that black holes occupy space in the universe the same way stars and planets do?
What do you mean by occupying space?

For example, if we enclose the Earth within a spherical surface, that has a surface area "A", what most people assume is that given "A" you should be able to tell the exact distance to the center of the Earth from the spherical surface as that would be the radius of the spherical surface. But in reality, the distance to the center of the Earth is further from the spherical surface than normal geometry would tell us.

Similarly, if we know "A", we should be able to figure out the volume of space inside that spherical surface around the Earth. But the actual volume is larger than what normal geometry would give us.

Now, the mathematics of all that is differential geometry (actually, pseudo-Riemannian geometry), and the singularities they are talking about are where things become undefined or non-differentiable.

The study of singularities (as mathematical objects) is very big in the areas of math I studied in school (differential geometry and differential topology), but are hard to fully explain, specially when you start trying to apply it to physics. Most people like flat space and constant time, and they have a hard time when curved space and relative time are brought into the picture.

And by most people, that includes a lot of physicists. You have to slowly develop the ability to think/visualize such environments. I realized early on as a physics major that I wasn't going to get that training in physics, I needed to get it from mathematics. I spent more than 4 years slowly working through undergraduate and graduate level courses and doing research to be able to see this type of stuff (actually, in math we don't stop at 4, 8, 10 or 12 dimensions, we throw out the number of dimensions altogether after a certain point).

So in the same way that I failed above in conveying how gravity works in a post, you can't expect an article in a magazine to properly summarize things it takes years to become familiar with. It takes a while to relearn geometry when space isn't flat.
 
Last month I read in a magazine on astronomy that some scientists holds open the possibility of so-called "black stars" where the event-horizon exist below the surface of the star, so that the surface itself is visible.
Well, it's not the first time I've hear of that, but I've never saw a convincing argument for it. It's far from my field of expertise, tho.

Anyway, I dont understand this singularity thing. Wouldnt it be natural to assume that black holes occupy space in the universe the same way stars and planets do?
Well, it's not like astrophysicists one day woke up and said "Wouldn't be cool if black holes had zero radius and infinite density?" There is a reason why black holes are thought to have such peculiar characteristics.

Gravity pulls matter together. And closer the matter is, stronger is the pull. Now, in normal situations, you reach a point when the repulsion between electrons in the outer regions of atoms balance the gravitational attraction, and you have normal matter. If you have higher density, then electronic repulsion is not enough. Christopher explained it better that I ever could, so I will just quote him:

Christopher said:
If there's enough gravity to overcome the repulsion of the atoms' electrons, it collapses to electron-degenerate matter, the stuff that white dwarfs (and probably Jupiter's core) are made of. The nuclei are jammed close together and the electrons form a sort of fluid shared by all of them. If the gravitational pull is even stronger, it collapses to the point that the electrons are forced into the protons, turning them into neutrons -- so you get neutron-degenerate matter, known in fiction as neutronium, the stuff that neutron stars are made of. Maybe you compress it enough that it becomes degenerate by one more stage, an undifferentiated mass of quarks (the elementary particles that protons and neutrons are made of), aka quark matter.

But if the gravity is strong enough even to overcome the repulsion between the quarks that allows them to exist as separate particles, then there's nothing to prevent it from being crushed down to an arbitrarily small size, small enough that the remaining mass becomes encased within an event horizon, since the gravity at the surface becomes so great that even light can't escape. Beyond that point, under classical or relativistic physics, there's nothing to stop collapse to infinitely small size, the point mass known as a singularity. Quantum physics suggests that singularities may not exist, that there's too much uncertainty at the microscopic level for anything to be compressed completely to zero size. However, it's still inside the event horizon, so it would look and act the same either way.
I hope it answer your question. :)
 
Christopher said:
If there's enough gravity to overcome the repulsion of the atoms' electrons, it collapses to electron-degenerate matter, the stuff that white dwarfs (and probably Jupiter's core) are made of. The nuclei are jammed close together and the electrons form a sort of fluid shared by all of them. If the gravitational pull is even stronger, it collapses to the point that the electrons are forced into the protons, turning them into neutrons -- so you get neutron-degenerate matter, known in fiction as neutronium, the stuff that neutron stars are made of. Maybe you compress it enough that it becomes degenerate by one more stage, an undifferentiated mass of quarks (the elementary particles that protons and neutrons are made of), aka quark matter.
But if the gravity is strong enough even to overcome the repulsion between the quarks that allows them to exist as separate particles, then there's nothing to prevent it from being crushed down to an arbitrarily small size, small enough that the remaining mass becomes encased within an event horizon, since the gravity at the surface becomes so great that even light can't escape. Beyond that point, under classical or relativistic physics, there's nothing to stop collapse to infinitely small size, the point mass known as a singularity. Quantum physics suggests that singularities may not exist, that there's too much uncertainty at the microscopic level for anything to be compressed completely to zero size. However, it's still inside the event horizon, so it would look and act the same either way.
I hope it answer your question. :)

Thanks for good explanation on the theory.

But isnt it still possible that a celestial body made out of quarks or maybe something even denser becomes heavy enough to swallow sun-light as well as all the other things? It`s also possible that there is a limit to mass-density that is not indefinite or involves singularity. Such a scenario would make it theoretically possible to carve out a peace of a black hole (Or maybe blow it up so that its separated into smaller junks of mass who have little or no gravity on their own) and put a peace of it on display back home. "Absolute mass! Very dense! Come look at it!"

If all black holes are singular in their tiny-ness, wouldnt that make all of them completely equal? I read somewhere that there probably is a "super-heavy" black hole in the midle of our galaxy that we revolve around, but if all black holes are equal, than one of them cant be any more "superheavy" than the others. And the one they are planning to make in Cern cant be "super-small" because they are all "Singular" and therefore equal. If all black holes are equall, than one cant consume our planet while another one can. It might off course also be that there has gone "inflation" into the word "black hole" and that things who are not at all black holes are given the name due to confusion.

Equal rights for all black holes! :bolian: or maybe more like: :evil:
 
Black holes are not equal -- the objects that we suspect are black holes range from about range from several solar masses to hundreds of millions of solar masses. The mass determines the size of the event horizon from within which nothing can escape. The radius varies as the black hole mass in solar masses times 3km, so a 10 solar mass black hole's event horizon would be 60km across. We cannot directly observe the singularity at the centre of a black hole and the known laws of physics break down under the conditions there. In fact, the name "singularity" arises because the deduced properties of the central region correspond to a mathematical singularity -- akin to dividing one by zero.
 
With the danger of being looked upon as annoying and stupid (specially in the field of black holes) My mind started spinning on something:

If we have a black hole, and then some pretty advanced civilisation wants ro remove it, or turn it into something visible. (maybe they just really hate black holes) Could they use anti-matter to do so?

The ball of anti-matter removes the same amount of mass as itself contains upon impact, thereby reducing the black hole in size. If it is big enough, or the black hole barely holds enough mass to be a black hole, then the explosion will make the black hole visible again. Since it also makes it loose gravitational pressure, it might start to grow, changing the properties in mass while doing so. Mass doesnt like to be squeezed together, so the densified mass might want to go back to earlier states such as quarks, neutrons, and then atoms with electrons.

Might such a event cause the life of the black hole to reverse in a way? Maybe it will end up as a big hydrogen star again?
 
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