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.
The study suggests that some event within the last 350 million years altered its trajectory, preventing it from settling into a circular orbit.
That’s within the current best estimates for the age of Saturn’s ring system… maybe the same catastrophic event that formed the rings is also responsible for the anomaly in Titan’s orbit?
An Einstein ring is an example of strong gravitational lensing,” explained study lead Conor O’Riordan of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany. “All strong lenses are special, because they’re so rare, and they’re incredibly useful scientifically. This one is particularly special because it’s so close to Earth and the alignment makes it very beautiful.”
I would never pretend I can even remotely wrap my head around this, but anything that helps us understand how gravity works seems like a scientific gold mine.
The precise mechanism is beyond me, but suffice it to say that light is affected by gravity.
If you imagine throwing a ball in space in a straight line near a massive body (like a planet), the ball will curve and its new straight path will now be permanently deviated from its original straight line.
Now imagine instead of throwing a ball, you’re emitting rays of light in all directions near a black hole. Light you emit towards the black hole will be lost to it, but light you emitted at an angle to the black hole will swing around it, just like the ball. If you imagine all the light you emitted slightly to the right, left, up, and down doing this, you can imagine that an observer on the other side could see all that light, appearing as though you were slightly right, left, up, and down from the black hole at the same time. This is what creates the ring.
You know how telescopes often use glass lenses to bend light into your eye? A gravitational lens is just a naturally occurring telescope, except that the gravity of a large object is the one bending the light towards us. From what I understand, an Einstein lens is just a gravitational lens where the elements for the lens sit in a particularly good setup.
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