Black hole singularity is a surface, not a point
Black hole singularity is a surface not a point
A new paper argues that the singularity at the center of a black hole is not a point but a surface. Two observers falling into a spherical black hole along different angular trajectories lose causal contact well before reaching the center, illustrating that in general relativity, points can be spatially close yet causally distant. For rotating black holes, the singular surface likely resides at the inner horizon, where perturbations trigger exponential mass inflation. The authors suggest that quantum gravity states of a black hole may reside on this 2D surface, coevolving with trapped Hawking radiation.
Counterintuitively, in general relativity two points can be spatially close yet causally distant.
- sigmoid10
Should be pointed out that this is a critique of common popsci journalism tropes and not a fancy new research result. Anyone who has taken a graduate level class in General Relativity would have been able to tell you the same.
- Certhas
As is nicely visualised by it's Penrose Diagram, e.g.
- sfink
Off-topic, but it makes me think of "reasoning black holes": you get enough like-minded people together that they start reinforcing each other's logic and beliefs until not only those people get completely detached from reality, but anyone who interacts with them gets sucked in as well unless their own logic ("velocity") is adequate to skirt the edge and escape, forever altered by the experience.
Similar questions arise: how would you know if you were inside one? The laws of logic ("physics") seemingly don't apply, but there's no way to test them in that environment.
- kazinator
> Black hole singularity is a surface not a point
Might they be trying to say this?
1. The boundary of the black hole which traps light, etc, is called the event horizon, and sits at the Schwarzschild radius. This is a geometric surface.
2. There is no singularity at this surface.
3. In models of black holes, there is a gravitational singularity at a point in the centre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_singularity
which is a topic with nuances.
- lukeify
I know this isn't a new discovery but I fully expect the next major theoretical physics breakthrough to be discovered by a frontier LLM at this point, given their aptitude at solving a lot of the recent mathematical conjectures.
- dj_axl
scoffs Well yeah everyone and their aunt knows singularities have 5 dimensions.
- imzadi
Would this apply also to the singularity at the beginning of the universe? I guess I thought that the singularity was where all matter is compressed so much that it occupies a zero dimension point. I'm not sure if that applies equally to black holes and the singularity at the beginning of the universe. I'm kind of dumb on this stuff even though it fascinates me.
- throwawayffffas
Or you know there is no such thing as a singularity, and stars collapse to fuzzballs[1]