Gonna hijack this post to ask a somewhat related but possibly stupid question, would it be possible that instead of a singularity there happened to be a region of space with non-negligible size (ie, not a point sized region) that acted like a well instead? Things could “fall” into that well and not be able to escape, but it’s not like everything in the well is at a single point.
I may be misunderstanding your question, but black holes are regions of space that have non-negligible size; the boundary between what can escape and what can’t is called the event horizon. The singularity is what happens at the center.
I guess what I mean to say is, would a non-negligible sized “singularity” (I know I’m messing with that term quite a bit, I’ll stray from the mathematical definition) be consistent with our current theories?
Basically, what makes sense logically isn’t backed up by what data and math we have. Logically, we would assume as enough stuff is pulled together that the density hits a point where gravity is stronger than the bonds that hold matter together, that those bonds would break and the individual elements, initially atoms, but as gravity gets stronger and stronger the bonds between the components of atoms and so on and so forth also break down.
At some point, there is a limit to how much matter can break back down into further and further smaller components. What specifically happens when that limit is reached? That is a huge part of what could be throwing the math off. We don’t really know, but we have some guesses. Could be at the end, one of the components is weightless, and unaffected by the gravity, we do see some energy radiating out of some black holes in a straight line or “jet”. Hard to say for sure. Logic doesn’t always get us there when we don’t have enough data and need to make a leap. It might eventually, as we can slowly tie more and more stuff together with more data. Could be whatever energy starts that jet either immediately or already on the way out, mixes/mixed with other components and particles to become what we end up detecting it as. But if we could see it earlier, it maybe would be completely different before that.
Depends what you mean by “our current theories”. In classical General Relatively the answer is pretty conclusively no but many people think that a quantum theory of gravity should be able to remove the singularities. In fact, this article is about an attempt to do just that with a fairly natural extension to GR (albeit one that is only mathematically tractable in 5 or more dimensions) and seems to have succeeded for the static spherically symmetric case at least.
Nobody really thinks singularities exist. It’s only what comes out from our math. That’s also how we know our math is wrong, we’re just not sure yet how to do it better.
Putting on my sci-fi hat; a distant galaxy that is likely a billion years older than ours, very likely has had enough time to develop life somewhere in the trillions of stars that formed within it, by the time the photons of that galaxy finally reached us and hit that very specific telescope sensor at that very specific moment the JWT engineers were observing.
Mathematically, it’s possible, but scientists are still skeptical about whether or not they are real. They’re called white holes and you can actually create a model of one in your kitchen sink. If you let the water just hit the bottom and spread out evenly in all directions, you can kind of visualize the way it’s supposed to work. Action Lab on YouTube actually has a pretty good video about it which I suggest watching if you’re interested. youtu.be/p3P4iKb24Ng?si=b3_RHuj0J3F_7DC1
Tangent, but you don’t need to include the question mark or anything after in most urls. Definitely not YouTube links. It’s just YouTube telling itself who shared the info (you) and they use that to track shit. But the link works just as well without it, and you’re not voluntary spying on yourself.
On Dec. 30, 2023, Juno came within about 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) of the surface of the solar system's most volcanic world. It made a second ultra-close flyby of Io just this week.
spacecraft Juno out there buzzing Io at high speed
Astronomy is constantly discovering never-befor observed phenomenon. The idea that you can simulate realistic images of anything requires you to have sufficient knowledge of reality, and astronomy keeps showing us that we don’t have that.
The only way I can see this being helpful is to train algorithms for what is already known and can be safely filtered out, making it easier to detect new observations
Neat to see a 6-7 solar mass black hole spotted. First one without a companion star to give it away! As we get better at finding black holes of this size, will be interesting to see if they end up explaining part of the “dark matter” problem.
phys.org
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