rocketsocks t1_ixp6hpx wrote on November 25, 2022 at 5:04 AM

Reply to comment by reDD1t1ng_ATM in Black hole or A neutron star? by Brilliant-Fee-690

A "black hole" is three different things. There's the physical object that creates the black hole, and as far as we can tell in our universe this is usually an object that collapses beyond the density of a neutron star. Likely the extreme pressure from enough mass compresses the neutron star into something like a ball of quark-gluon plasma, but we don't have a ton of knowledge of materials in these conditions so it could be something else as well. When that collapses small enough to form an event horizon everything changes, you have the before times and the after times. After the event horizon forms the outside universe is cut off from the interior of the black hole. It's not only impractical for matter or light to escape the event horizon, it's impossible because there's no space-time trajectories that exist that make that connection, everything is one way, you can enter the event horizon but you can't leave it. At that point whatever the object had been before becomes merely historical trivia for the outside universe, the only thing that's relevant is the event horizon, a phenomenon of space-time. Within the black hole we don't entirely know exactly what happens, and we can't exactly check either so this is still the subject of a lot of ongoing theoretical physics work. Very likely we won't have a good understanding of what happens inside a black hole until we develop a theory of quantum gravity or something equivalent, and it doesn't look like that's going to happen anytime soon.

There is this idea of the information paradox of a black hole due to the fact that they "evaporate" through Hawking radiation. This happens on far too long a timescale to be relevant to human experience, but it's an interesting theoretical problem. In theory Hawking radiation should be uniform, which means that all the quantum information locked away inside the black hole (things like how many protons and electrons fell into it, which in theory are conserved quantities) could essentially get deleted, in seeming violation of conservation laws. There are some interesting theories about how to resolve this paradox, but they are still being developed and it'll be hard to verify them.

reDD1t1ng_ATM t1_ixxg5n5 wrote on November 27, 2022 at 3:22 AM

If your not a physicist you should be, this is great stuff. I have 2 questions, 1 being when the black whole forms does it take on the shape of the sphere or just it just take on some wild shape because for it to become sphere like wouldnt it need the grvity of something else pulling on it as well as its own gravity? Number two you mentioned it collapses into quarkplasma like stuf isnt that where the quarks become super quarks where that particle now becomes infections where anything the super quark touches it will also tske on the shape and for of a super quar become very dense and infections as well?

rocketsocks t1_iy0r3c1 wrote on November 27, 2022 at 9:41 PM

In Earthly experience quarks are confined within small particles such as protons, neutrons, and other more exotic but short lived particles. Under more extreme conditions quarks can instead exist in a more unconfined form in larger "chunks" than just protons or neutrons. One example being a quark-gluon plasma which requires very high temperatures but is potentially denser than nuclear matter because it can be more highly compressed. Theoretically there might be other states of "quark matter" which might be stable in conditions other than those required to sustain a quark-gluon plasma. This could include "strange matter" and other exotic collections of large numbers of quarks. We've studied quark-gluon plasmas experimentally but we have never created other forms of quark matter so they still remain the subject of speculation and research.

It may be possible that there are routes to creating a higher density object than a neutron star that don't involve a quark-gluon plasma but we don't know for sure. In any event, when a neutron star is crushed down enough (whether via creation of a quark-gluon plasma or through some other form of matter) an event horizon can form. Very early on you'll have a bunch of very high density matter which is still being pushed inward with incredibly force/speed due to collapse and this will feed directly into the event horizon causing it to grow. At some point the rotation of the star/black hole creates a little bit of a delay in how fast matter can fall into the event horizon as an accretion disk forms and that matter takes several seconds to fall in. The black hole feeding on ultra-dense matter in its near proximity releases a lot of energy through the glowing of the accretion disk and the formation of axial jets (due to tightly wound magnetic fields from the accretion disk), creating some of the most energetic events in the universe: gamma ray bursts.

In any event, like everything else in the universe black holes typically have some amount of rotation, which causes the event horizon to have an ellipsoid shape. When an event horizon is created it's sort of like a space-time relic of the gravitational fields of its progenitor. As matter falls into the black hole it basically encapsulates the old event horizon in a new larger event horizon.