A Few Random Thoughts About Cosmic Black Holes

Every now and again a thought about this or that occurs to me which I then scribble down for posterity. Here are a few that relate to the concept of the astronomical object known as a Frozen Star but way more commonly referred to as a Black Hole.

*Space is not the final frontier. The ultimate challenge is to ‘boldly go’ past the event horizon of a Black Hole and see what’s to be seen.

*One of the 64,000 $64,000 questions: Can you pour stuff down a Black Hole indefinitely, or does the Black Hole have a finite capacity and ultimately or eventually will have to spew stuff out the ‘other side’ (i.e. – thus producing a White Hole) as you keep pouring in more and more and more? I’d wager the conservation relationships and principles of physics and chemistry hold sway here. What goes in ultimately comes out. That doesn’t mean there’s not a temporary holding vessel. Or, in more human terms, you fill what’s empty; you empty what’s full, but in-between those two there’s storage in the stomach and the intestines; the lungs and the bladder.

*A Black Hole has a finite amount of mass therefore a finite amount of gravity and therefore a finite escape velocity, even if the value of same is in excess of the speed of light – the ultimate cosmic speed limit. Somehow this makes these astrophysical objects really special. However, there’s nothing different in principle vis-à-vis the Earth having a finite amount of mass, gravity and escape velocity. If Planet Earth isn’t all that special for having those three properties, why should a Black Hole be?

*If an electron acquired enough mass (say by being accelerated to near light speed), would it become a Black Hole, and if so, would the ‘inside’ still be an electron, which after all, is considered a fundamental particle?

*Black Holes would make excellent, in fact perfect, thermos (vacuum) flasks. Pour into a Black Hole the contents of a star, say like the Sun. All that heat is then trapped and I do mean trapped!

*It’s impossible IMHO to have stuff of infinite density and occupying zero volume so whatever is inside a Black Hole has finite density and occupies a finite volume.

*What lies at the heart of a Black Hole? The traditional answer is a ‘singularity’ – a point of (near) infinite density and (close to) zero volume, matter crushed down to the final, ultimate limit – or maybe not.

Start with a hunk of matter. Keep on keeping on adding more and more and more matter (mass) to it. Your original hunk grows larger, ever denser; its gravity swells in proportion. Finally it’s just a fraction away from achieving Black Hole status – meaning its gravity is so strong not even light can escape from its grasp.

So you are a thimbleful of salt away from crossing the not-quite-yet a Black Hole to an actual Black Hole boundary. You can (barely) still see your now super-sized hunk of stuff. Now toss in that final thimbleful of stuff onto the hunk. No light now reaches you – you’ve crossed the threshold or boundary and have got a Black Hole. But do you doubt that lurking on the other side of the not-quite-yet a Black Hole to an actual Black Hole boundary, though unseen, you still have that super-sized hunk of stuff, not a singularity, but a really real solid 3-D hunk of stuff? Or, in other words, if the escape velocity of your hunk is 185,999 miles per second, no Black Hole and no singularity, but if it climbs to 186,001 miles per second you have a Black Hole and your hunk morphs into a singularity? A two mile a second difference makes that much difference? I don’t think so.

*In our Universe there are two kinds of astronomical objects. There are cosmic faucets like stars and anything else that gives off or reflects electromagnetic (EM) waves. That’s the cosmic “In Tray”. Then there are cosmic sinks and drains that absorb electromagnetic waves – Black Holes, the cosmic “Out Tray”.

It would seem to me that over the course of 13.7 billion years, an awful lot of EM (light, IR, UV, radio, microwave, gamma-ray, etc.) photons, not to mention neutrinos and cosmic rays, would have gobbled up and removed from the Universe’s inventory by being sucked into and forever residing in the insides of Black Holes. Since all astronomical observations, hence conclusions about the state of the Universe, rely on the detection of that which is emitted or reflected by cosmic faucets, then it stands to reason that in order to arrive at valid conclusions, what cosmic sinks and drains remove from the Big EM Picture must be taken into account. But is it? I’ve never read any account where the removal of EM photons from the Universe’s inventory has been considered.   

*Black Holes won’t ultimately evaporate via Hawking radiation since input of matter and energy will exceed output. In other words, more matter and energy will find there way into a Black Hole than will escape via that Hawking radiation.