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Toebean_Farmer t1_ja8rq5u wrote

Reply to comment by WhoStalledMyCar in Recently Correlated Black Hole Mass and Dark Energy Questions by WhoStalledMyCar

I don’t think so. With our current understanding of black holes, there seems to be no sort of peak energy one black hole can handle, they just keep growing depending on how much mass it can absorb.

Another thing is hawking radiation. As we understand it, black holes do decay, just very slowly. Because it’s theorized that supermassive black holes will completely decay in a relatively similar amount of time as a smaller black hole, you can hypothesize that the more mass leads to more hawking radiation EDIT: checked and the smaller a black hole, the quicker it does decay.

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WhoStalledMyCar OP t1_ja8t9s8 wrote

Hmmm, true.

Does our understanding of Hawking radiation bake in the possibility of a singularity-free black hole (subject to interior vacuum energy) or the assumption there is a singularity (no interior vacuum energy)?

Does an expanding event horizon contradict the idea of a singularity? ie how does a point of infinite density permit a variable horizon if new mass doesn’t alter the density?

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Toebean_Farmer t1_ja8wizu wrote

A singularity is quite literally the name of the impossible: it’s the point within a black hole that quantum physics breaks down. So you’re correct in that event horizons contradict them. EVERYTHING contradicts them, yet there they are.

And so yes, when Hawking was theorizing black hole decay, he was specifically trying to figure out what a singularity was. He collaborated on different theories just trying to understand singularities, whether black holes had them or not, and how they might be formed. They basically confirmed that, “yep, some spooky shit happens in there we don’t have the tools to understand yet.”

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