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What's
at the CENTER of
Black Holes?
World
famous Canadian Science Fiction novelist
Mark A. Carter edits and reprints a
mini-article from livescience.com by staff writer
Zoe Macintosh from
June 22, 2010 for your edification as it pertains to
the film: Interstellar.
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the black hole named Gargantua |
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from the Christopher Nolan film: Interstellar |
Produced from the implosion of
massive stars, black holes
are wells in the fabric of space-time
so deep that nothing, not even light, can escape them.
At the center of a
black hole is what physicists call a
singularity, or a point where extremely large
amounts of matter are crushed into an infinitely small amount
of space.
"From
a theoretical point of view, the singularity is something that
becomes something infinitely large," said physicist
Sabine Hossenfelder at the
Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Technically, that something
is the curvature of space or the heightened gravity that scientists
have observed in the presence of very large masses like planets
and stars.
Similar to how a stretched rubber
sheet dips around a bowling ball, massive objects can cause
space-time to curve around them. And the more massive
the object is, the steeper the curvature will be. First theorized
by Einstein, nowhere is this
effect more extreme than for a black
hole, whose center represents infinitely curving curve.
Like a bottomless hole in a rubber sheet, the force becomes infinitely
bigger as objects travel further and further into the hole.
Around the
singularity, particles and materials are compressed.
As matter collapses into a black hole, its density becomes infinitely
large because it must fit into a point that, according to equations,
is so small that it has zero dimensions.
Some scientists have debated
whether the theoretical equations that describe
black holes are correct meaning whether they actually
exist.
"No
one can be sure that their singularity describes a physical reality,
Hossfelder told
Life's Little Mysteries. But most physicists would
say that the singularity,
as theorized by equations, doesn't really exist.
"If the singularity was really real, then it would
mean that energy density was infinitely large at one point,
at exactly the center of the black hole," she said.
However, no one can know for
sure, because no complete quantum
theory of gravity exists, and the insides of
black holes are impossible to observe.
http://www.livescience.com/32662-whats-at-the-center-of-black-holes-.html
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