Feb 23rd 2023, 12:33:35
A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing, including light or other electromagnetic waves, has enough energy to escape its event horizon.[2] The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform spacetime to form a black hole.[3][4] The boundary of no escape is called the event horizon. Although it has a great effect on the fate and circumstances of an object crossing it, it has no locally detectable features according to general relativity.[5] In many ways, a black hole acts like an ideal black body, as it reflects no light.[6][7] Moreover, quantum field theory in curved spacetime predicts that event horizons emit Hawking radiation, with the same spectrum as a black body of a temperature inversely proportional to its mass. This temperature is of the order of billionths of a kelvin for stellar black holes, making it essentially impossible to observe directly.
Objects whose gravitational fields are too strong for light to escape were first considered in the 18th century by John Michell and Pierre-Simon Laplace.[8] In 1916, Karl Schwarzschild found the first modern solution of general relativity that would characterize a black hole. David Finkelstein, in 1958, first published the interpretation of "black hole" as a region of space from which nothing can escape. Black holes were long considered a mathematical curiosity; it was not until the 1960s that theoretical work showed they were a generic prediction of general relativity. The discovery of neutron stars by Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 1967 sparked interest in gravitationally collapsed compact objects as a possible astrophysical reality. The first black hole known was Cygnus X-1, identified by several researchers independently in 1971.[9][10]
Black holes of stellar mass form when massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle. After a black hole has formed, it can grow by absorbing mass from its surroundings. Supermassive black holes of millions of solar masses (M☉) may form by absorbing other stars and merging with other black holes. There is consensus that supermassive black holes exist in the centres of most galaxies.
The presence of a black hole can be inferred through its interaction with other matter and with electromagnetic radiation such as visible light. Any matter that falls onto a black hole can form an external accretion disk heated by friction, forming quasars, some of the brightest objects in the universe. Stars passing too close to a supermassive black hole can be shredded into streamers that shine very brightly before being "swallowed."[11] If other stars are orbiting a black hole, their orbits can determine the black hole's mass and location. Such observations can be used to exclude possible alternatives such as neutron stars. In this way, astronomers have identified numerous stellar black hole candidates in binary systems and established that the radio source known as Sagittarius A*, at the core of the Milky Way galaxy, contains a supermassive black hole of about 4.3 million solar masses.
History
Simulated view of a black hole in front of the Large Magellanic Cloud. Note the gravitational lensing effect, which produces two enlarged but highly distorted views of the Cloud. Across the top, the Milky Way disk appears distorted into an arc. Published in 2019.[12]
The idea of a body so big that even light could not escape was briefly proposed by English astronomical pioneer and clergyman John Michell in a letter published in November 1784. Michell's simplistic calculations assumed such a body might have the same density as the Sun, and concluded that one would form when a star's diameter exceeds the Sun's by a factor of 500, and its surface escape velocity exceeds the usual speed of light. Michell referred to these bodies as dark stars.[13] He correctly noted that such supermassive but non-radiating bodies might be detectable through their gravitational effects on nearby visible bodies.[8][14][15] Scholars of the time were initially excited by the proposal that giant but invisible 'dark stars' might be hiding in plain view, but enthusiasm dampened when the wavelike nature of light became apparent in the early nineteenth century,[16] as if light were a wave rather than a particle, it was unclear what, if any, influence gravity would have on escaping light waves.[8][15]
Modern physics discredits Michell's notion of a light ray shooting directly from the surface of a supermassive star, being slowed down by the star's gravity, stopping, and then free-falling back to the star's surface.[17]
General relativity
See also: History of general relativity
General relativity
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In 1915, Albert Einstein developed his theory of general relativity, having earlier shown that gravity does influence light's motion. Only a few months later, Karl Schwarzschild found a solution to the Einstein field equations that describes the gravitational field of a point mass and a spherical mass.[18][19] A few months after Schwarzschild, Johannes Droste, a student of Hendrik Lorentz, independently gave the same solution for the point mass and wrote more extensively about its properties.[20][21] This solution had a peculiar behaviour at what is now called the Schwarzschild radius, where it became singular, meaning that some of the terms in the Einstein equations became infinite. The nature of this surface was not quite understood at the time. In 1924, Arthur Eddington showed that the singularity disappeared after a change of coordinates (see Eddington–Finkelstein coordinates), although it took until 1933 for Georges Lemaître to realize that this meant the singularity at the Schwarzschild radius was a non-physical coordinate singularity.[22] Arthur Eddington did however comment on the possibility of a star with mass compressed to the Schwarzschild radius in a 1926 book, noting that Einstein's theory allows us to rule out overly large densities for visible stars like Betelgeuse because "a star of 250 million km radius could not possibly have so high a density as the Sun. Firstly, the force of gravitation would be so great that light would be unable to escape from it, the rays falling back to the star like a stone to the earth. Secondly, the red shift of the spectral lines would be so great that the spectrum would be shifted out of existence. Thirdly, the mass would produce so much curvature of the spacetime metric that space would close up around the star, leaving us outside (i.e., nowhere)."[23][24]
In 1931, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar calculated, using special relativity, that a non-rotating body of electron-degenerate matter above a certain limiting mass (now called the Chandrasekhar limit at 1.4 M☉) has no stable solutions.[25] His arguments were opposed by many of his contemporaries like Eddington and Lev Landau, who argued that some yet unknown mechanism would stop the collapse.[26] They were partly correct: a white dwarf slightly more massive than the Chandrasekhar limit will collapse into a neutron star,[27] which is itself stable. But in 1939, Robert Oppenheimer and others predicted that neutron stars above another limit (the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit) would collapse further for the reasons presented by Chandrasekhar, and concluded that no law of physics was likely to intervene and stop at least some stars from collapsing to black holes.[28] Their original calculations, based on the Pauli exclusion principle, gave it as 0.7 M☉; subsequent consideration of neutron-neutron repulsion mediated by the strong force raised the estimate to approximately 1.5 M☉ to 3.0 M☉.[29] Observations of the neutron star merger GW170817, which is thought to have generated a black hole shortly afterward, have refined the TOV limit estimate to ~2.17 M☉.[30][31][32][33][34]
Oppenheimer and his co-authors interpreted the singularity at the boundary of the Schwarzschild radius as indicating that this was the boundary of a bubble in which time stopped. This is a valid point of view for external observers, but not for infalling observers. Because of this property, the collapsed stars were called "frozen stars", because an outside observer would see the surface of the star frozen in time at the instant where its collapse takes it to the Schwarzschild radius.[35]
Golden age
In 1958, David Finkelstein identified the Schwarzschild surface as an event horizon, "a perfect unidirectional membrane: causal influences can cross it in only one direction".[36] This did not strictly contradict Oppenheimer's results, but extended them to include the point of view of infalling observers. Finkelstein's solution extended the Schwarzschild solution for the future of observers falling into a black hole. A complete extension had already been found by Martin Kruskal, who was urged to publish it.[37]
These results came at the beginning of the golden age of general relativity, which was marked by general relativity and black holes becoming mainstream subjects of research. This process was helped by the discovery of pulsars by Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 1967,[38][39] which, by 1969, were shown to be rapidly rotating neutron stars.[40] Until that time, neutron stars, like black holes, were regarded as just theoretical curiosities; but the discovery of pulsars showed their physical relevance and spurred a further interest in all types of compact objects that might be formed by gravitational collapse.[citation needed]
In this period more general black hole solutions were found. In 1963, Roy Kerr found the exact solution for a rotating black hole. Two years later, Ezra Newman found the axisymmetric solution for a black hole that is both rotating and electrically charged.[41] Through the work of Werner Israel,[42] Brandon Carter,[43][44] and David Robinson[45] the no-hair theorem emerged, stating that a stationary black hole solution is completely described by the three parameters of the Kerr–Newman metric: mass, angular momentum, and electric charge.[46]
At first, it was suspected that the strange features of the black hole solutions were pathological artifacts from the symmetry conditions imposed, and that the singularities would not appear in generic situations. This view was held in particular by Vladimir Belinsky, Isaak Khalatnikov, and Evgeny Liffluffz, who tried to prove that no singularities appear in generic solutions. However, in the late 1960s Roger Penrose[47] and Stephen Hawking used global techniques to prove that singularities appear generically.[48] For this work, Penrose received half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics, Hawking having died in 2018.[49] Based on observations in Greenwich and Toronto in the early 1970s, Cygnus X-1, a galactic X-ray source discovered in 1964, became the first astronomical object commonly accepted to be a black hole.[50][51]
Work by James Bardeen, Jacob Bekenstein, Carter, and Hawking in the early 1970s led to the formulation of black hole thermodynamics.[52] These laws describe the behaviour of a black hole in close analogy to the laws of thermodynamics by relating mass to energy, area to entropy, and surface gravity to temperature. The analogy was completed when Hawking, in 1974, showed that quantum field theory implies that black holes should radiate like a black body with a temperature proportional to the surface gravity of the black hole, predicting the effect now known as Hawking radiation.[53]
Observation
On 11 February 2016, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo collaboration announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves, representing the first observation of a black hole merger.[54] On 10 April 2019, the first direct image of a black hole and its vicinity was published, following observations made by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) in 2017 of the supermassive black hole in Messier 87's galactic centre.[55][56][57] As of 2021, the nearest known body thought to be a black hole is around 1,500 light-years (460 parsecs) away (see list of nearest black holes). Though only a couple dozen black holes have been found so far in the Milky Way, there are thought to be hundreds of millions, most of which are solitary and do not cause emission of radiation.[58] Therefore, they would only be detectable by gravitational lensing.
Etymology
John Michell used the term "dark star" in a November 1783 letter to Henry Cavendish,[59] and in the early 20th century, physicists used the term "gravitationally collapsed object". Science writer Marcia Bartusiak traces the term "black hole" to physicist Robert H. fluffe, who in the early 1960s reportedly compared the phenomenon to the Black Hole of Calcutta, notorious as a prison where people entered but never left alive.[60]
The term "black hole" was used in print by Life and Science News magazines in 1963,[60] and by science journalist Ann Ewing in her article "'Black Holes' in Space", dated 18 January 1964, which was a report on a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held in Cleveland, Ohio.[61][62]
In December 1967, a student reportedly suggested the phrase "black hole" at a lecture by John Wheeler;[61] Wheeler adopted the term for its brevity and "advertising value", and it quickly caught on,[63] leading some to credit Wheeler with coining the phrase.[64]
Properties and structure
Simple illustration of a non-spinning black hole
Artistic depiction of a black hole and its features
The no-hair theorem postulates that, once it achieves a stable condition after formation, a black hole has only three independent physical properties: mass, electric charge, and angular momentum; the black hole is otherwise featureless. If the conjecture is true, any two black holes that share the same values for these properties, or parameters, are indistinguishable from one another. The degree to which the conjecture is true for real black holes under the laws of modern physics is currently an unsolved problem.[46]
These properties are special because they are visible from outside a black hole. For example, a charged black hole repels other like charges just like any other charged object. Similarly, the total mass inside a sphere containing a black hole can be found by using the gravitational analog of Gauss's law (through the ADM mass), far away from the black hole.[65] Likewise, the angular momentum (or spin) can be measured from far away using frame dragging by the gravitomagnetic field, through for example the Lense–Thirring effect.[66]
When an object falls into a black hole, any information about the shape of the object or distribution of charge on it is evenly distributed along the horizon of the black hole, and is lost to outside observers. The behavior of the horizon in this situation is a dissipative system that is closely analogous to that of a conductive stretchy membrane with friction and electrical resistance—the membrane paradigm.[67] This is different from other field theories such as electromagnetism, which do not have any friction or resistivity at the microscopic level, because they are time-reversible. Because a black hole eventually achieves a stable state with only three parameters, there is no way to avoid losing information about the initial conditions: the gravitational and electric fields of a black hole give very little information about what went in. The information that is lost includes every quantity that cannot be measured far away from the black hole horizon, including approximately conserved quantum numbers such as the total baryon number and lepton number. This behavior is so puzzling that it has been called the black hole information loss paradox.[68][69]
Gravitational time dilation around a black hole
Physical properties
The simplest static black holes have mass but neither electric charge nor angular momentum. These black holes are often referred to as Schwarzschild black holes after Karl Schwarzschild who discovered this solution in 1916.[19] According to Birkhoff's theorem, it is the only vacuum solution that is spherically symmetric.[70] This means there is no observable difference at a distance between the gravitational field of such a black hole and that of any other spherical object of the same mass. The popular notion of a black hole "sucking in everything" in its surroundings is therefore correct only near a black hole's horizon; far away, the external gravitational field is identical to that of any other body of the same mass.[71]
Solutions describing more general black holes also exist. Non-rotating charged black holes are described by the Reissner–Nordström metric, while the Kerr metric describes a non-charged rotating black hole. The most general stationary black hole solution known is the Kerr–Newman metric, which describes a black hole with both charge and angular momentum.[72]
While the mass of a black hole can take any positive value, the charge and angular momentum are constrained by the mass. The total electric charge Q and the total angular momentum J are expected to satisfy the inequality
for a black hole of mass M. Black holes with the minimum possible mass satisfying this inequality are called extremal. Solutions of Einstein's equations that violate this inequality exist, but they do not possess an event horizon. These solutions have so-called naked singularities that can be observed from the outside, and hence are deemed unphysical. The cosmic censorship hypothesis rules out the formation of such singularities, when they are created through the gravitational collapse of realistic matter.[3] This is supported by numerical simulations.[73]
Due to the relatively large strength of the electromagnetic force, black holes forming from the collapse of stars are expected to retain the nearly neutral charge of the star. Rotation, however, is expected to be a universal feature of compact astrophysical objects. The black-hole candidate binary X-ray source GRS 1915+105[74] appears to have an angular momentum near the maximum allowed value. That uncharged limit is[75]
allowing definition of a dimensionless spin parameter such that[75]
Black hole classifications
Class Approx.
mass Approx.
radius
Supermassive black hole 105–1010 M☉ 0.001–400 AU
Intermediate-mass black hole 103 M☉ 103 km ≈ REarth
Stellar black hole 10 M☉ 30 km
Micro black hole up to MMoon up to 0.1 mm
Black holes are commonly classified according to their mass, independent of angular momentum, J. The size of a black hole, as determined by the radius of the event horizon, or Schwarzschild radius, is proportional to the mass, M, through
where rs is the Schwarzschild radius and M☉ is the mass of the Sun.[77] For a black hole with nonzero spin and/or electric charge, the radius is smaller,[Note 2] until an extremal black hole could have an event horizon close to[78]
Event horizon
Main article: Event horizon
Far away from the black hole, a particle can move in any direction, as illustrated by the set of arrows. It is restricted only by the speed of light.
Closer to the black hole, spacetime starts to deform. There are more paths going towards the black hole than paths moving away.[Note 3]
Inside of the event horizon, all paths bring the particle closer to the centre of the black hole. It is no longer possible for the particle to escape.
The defining feature of a black hole is the appearance of an event horizon—a boundary in spacetime through which matter and light can pass only inward towards the mass of the black hole. Nothing, not even light, can escape from inside the event horizon.[80][81] The event horizon is referred to as such because if an event occurs within the boundary, information from that event cannot reach an outside observer, maki
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