Black holes don't suck

bogwalrus

Please excuse the title but I had to go there:)


Just finished watching a lovely documentary with some 3d Hubble rendered images on our Universe.


Whatever way they were talking about dark matter and Black Holes it made me think that maybe black holes are leaking the dark matter into our Universe and that the apparent sucking is just ordinary matter getting sucked into the slip stream of the leakage.

It showed some computer images of a sun interacting with a Black hole and the argument could possibly be made that it was just getting sucked in by the energy being released not that there is a gaping hole into oblivion. Sort of like a vortex when you pull the plug in a where the water resembles dark matter and the other side of the plug is our universe. In a vortex the centre atmosphere appears to be on both sides of the plug hole that's why you can see through the eye.

Of course I actually have no clue about these things as I am not a scientist but my imagination does get the better of me sometimes. Still if someone would like to entertain the possibility for a while :rolleyes:

Lbeard

bogwalrus wrote: »

Of course I actually have no clue about these things as I am not a scientist but my imagination does get the better of me sometimes. Still if someone would like to entertain the possibility for a while :rolleyes:

Yeah, black holes are wonderful to think of. And though a lot is known about gravity, no one knows what it is.

I think I know what you're getting at. Like when you hold a bottle of water upside down and open the top - water flows out as air presses in. Or when you pull a plug hole in the bath, air from the sinkhole rises and creates a vortex with the water sinking. Okay, it's easy to get a wrongheaded child's eye view of what is happening in the bath. If the bath was in zero gravity, you would have to push the bath water down the plug hole.

Just to start with, talking in those terms can always causes confusion. A vacuum does not suck or even push (though in fact it does slightly push but only noticeable on a cosmic scale.). If you sit in a vacuum chamber, your eyes will pop out of your head. It's not the vacuum sucking your eyes out. The hot molecules in your body are moving in random directions. Under normal circumstances there are enough molecules outside of your body, also traveling in random directions, to keep your eyes hammered into your head. You experience this as heat. And you experience your eyes staying in your head as nothing happening. In reality your eyes are constantly trying to pop out of your head, and the air is constantly hammering them with trillions of collisions to keep them stuck in. This is thermodynamics.

Although Democritus the ancient Greek, had a more accurate picture of the real world, in atoms and their motion, everyone else assumed, up to relatively recently, that heat was its' own thing. Now we know that heat is the movement of particles. The quantum picture of the universe is a thermodynamic theory. The problem is, of course, Gravity, will not play fair - and it just will not go away.

Einstein's theory is that gravity distorts space. The accepted theory for black holes is their gravity is so strong that they distort space faster than the speed of light. Light trying to escape a black hole travels for billions of years at the speed of light and gets nowhere.

I think there could be a strong argument that gravity is something pushing, not something sucking. (Like the misconception of eyes being sucked out in a vacuum chamber.) What I mean really is, that things we measure and have solid laws and theories regarding, it could be like we're putting some device in a vacuum chamber and mistaking the measurement for the sucking power of the vacuum, when its' a <i>lack</i> of a pushing power that makes the vacuum a vacuum.

bogwalrus

Lbeard wrote: »

It's not the vacuum sucking your eyes out. The hot molecules in your body are moving in random directions. Under normal circumstances there are enough molecules outside of your body, also traveling in random directions, to keep your eyes hammered into your head. You experience this as heat. And you experience your eyes staying in your head as nothing happening. In reality your eyes are constantly trying to pop out of your head, and the air is constantly hammering them with trillions of collisions to keep them stuck in. This is thermodynamics.

You should have put a nightmare warning on that. That's just amazing. Is that the main reason my head is held together because of the atmosphere and its particles just hitting my particles into place?

When I think of a vacuum I think of pressure. Such as sucking the air out of a tin can and it gets crushed by the atmosphere (matter) outside. Is it only crushing because there is no longer particles bouncing around inside? I know dark matter is present even in a vacuum so obviously its level of interference does not effect anything to do with the matter that makes us up. Maybe though at the point of a Black hole both matter and dark matter can stop and say hi to each other. Or interact.

I remember reading Hawking and how he discovered the radiation emitting from the black holes. Maybe that piece of radiation is riding the wave of dark matter back into our universe?

Also in relation to the Vortex I was seeing it as Dark Matter is the water coming from the other side of the black hole leaking into our vacuum universe where what is observed in our side is matter being sucked into the void just like you would see in a vortex.

I know I am going way over my head here so you don't actually have to answer some of the things that seem nonsense:)

I just sometimes like to think complicated things can be explained in understandable terms. It works for a lot of stuff. You then have to go and do the math which is the annoying part.

sherr1ngton

Me too.

I've been thinking about black holes a lot lately and I got to thinking that there may be an awful lot of hype accreting around them.

As I understand it, a black hole is essentially a star that has run out of fusionable material whereupon it collapses under its own gravity. If the spent star is massive enough, it collapses through a number of stages that have to do with overcoming the electron degeneracy barrier where electrons are forced to violate the Pauli exclusion principle and so are destroyed and the neutron degeneracy barrier where neutrons are forced to occupy the same space which suggests that matter is converted into its constituent quarks inside a black hole.

It's as if black holes convert matter into pure heat and then refuse to radiate it.

But I realised a couple of things.

For instance, we know that the mass of a proton is much greater than the mass of the three quarks it is comprised of. It's the same with neutrons. So, as the protons, neutrons and electrons are destroyed, the black hole loses a disproportionate amount of mass instantaneously to the Higgs field, or whatever it is that is responsible for mass, and its gravity is suddenly weakened. And how much of a black hole's mass is in the form of massless photons at any one time?

If a black hole converts its entire mass into quarks then it will lose about 98.35% of its mass at a stroke. What effect would that have on it gravity?

The way I see it is if a star collapses to the extent that it can convert matter to pure energy at its core, the momentum and inertia of the collapsing mass would result in a large proportion of the mass of the star to be converted in massless energy.

This would cause the collapse to halt and expansion to begin and what follows that could be a big bang event.

I'm thinking of how the core might react to a relaxation of gravity. Around the core, quark would be recombining and breaking apart again but if there is any kind of expansion then the quark can stay recombined and the electrons might reappear again.

Further out from the core protons can combine with electrons which creates fusionable material.

If fusion then occurs, and we know that some large stars are fusing different elements in seperate spheres around the core, then there would be a shock wave that would travel up towards the surface of the star, countering gravity, and one that travels to the core where one more cycle of matter to energy conversion occurs whereupon the core collapses, releasing a pile of energy which overcomes gravity and the black hole should explode into fragments of heavy elements.

And a black hole with an accretion disk has even bigger problems.

In order to maintain constant gravity, for each sixty protons that are destroyed, fifty-nine new ones must be added to the mass of the black hole. Any less and the core will begin to cool, any more and the conversion process will be accelerated.

This kind of thinking has led me to conclude that it is highly unlikely that a supermassive black hole with a mass of 44-million solar masses lies at the centre of the galaxy. An object of that mass would spontaneously lose more than 30-million solar masses through the breaking apart of protons and neutrons.

Also, I wonder what the effect of a supernova occuring in the viscinity of a black hole would be.

And surely black holes can become disturbed in the presence of large stars with huge gravitational fields. I mean, couldn't a black hole of a couple of solar masses be absorbed by a star of say 100 solar masses?

Of course I am mainly just musing here but I really don't see how black holes can exist in the way, as it appears to me, science describes.

Especially supermassive ones.

I hope that black hole are destructable. I think that if the universe is doomed to end as a sea of black holes moving apart forever due to expansion, then enough time has passed for that to already have occured.

It seems more likely that black holes can be persuaded to give up their energy and be re-ignited as born again stars.

And one last thing.

Stars that are close enough to other stars to be effected by gravity tend to burn hotter and expand faster. It is thought that particularly strong gravitational fields can precipitate a nova/supernova event.

If this is the case then a significant proportion of such events should be observed to occur at the centres of galaxies. One might even expect to see clusters of events in the region of a supermassive black hole at the centre of each galaxy.

But the pattern of supernova events appears to be totally random.

It just got me thinking like.