The Black Hole

Nguyen Xuan Truong

June 10, 2020
LATEX 2ε THE BLACK HOLE

Contents Black holes of stellar mass are expected to

form when very massive stars collapse at the
I General 2 end of their life cycle. After a black hole has
formed, it can continue to grow by absorb-
II History 3 ing mass from its surroundings. By absorbing
1 General relativity . . . . . . . . 3 other stars and merging with other black holes,
supermassive black holes of millions of solar
III Reference 4 masses may form. There is consensus that su-
permassive black holes exist in the centers of
most galaxies.
I General
The presence of a black hole can be in-
A black hole is a region of spacetime exhibit- ferred through its interaction with other mat-
ing gravitational acceleration so strong that ter and with electromagnetic radiation such as
nothing - no particles or even electromagnetic visible light. Matter that falls onto a black
radiation such as light - can escape from it. hole can form an external accretion disk heated
The theory of general relativity predicts that by friction, forming some of the brightest ob-
a sufficiently compact mass can deform space- jects in the universe. Stars passing too close
time to form a black hole. The boundary of to a supermassive black hole can be shred into
the region from which no escape is possible is streamers that shine very brightly before be-
called the event horizon. Although the event ing ”swallowed”. If there are other stars or-
horizon has an enormous effect on the fate biting a black hole, their orbits can be used
and circumstances of an object crossing it, to determine the black hole’s mass and loca-
no locally detectable features appear to be ob- tion. Such observations can be used to exclude
served. In many ways, a black hole acts like an possible alternatives such as neutron stars. In
ideal black body, as it reflects no light. More- this way, astronomers have identified numerous
over, quantum field theory in curved spacetime stellar black hole candidates in binary systems,
predicts that event horizons emit Hawking ra- and established that the radio source known as
diation, with the same spectrum as a black Sagittarius A*, at the core of the Milky Way
body of a temperature inversely proportional galaxy, contains a supermassive black hole of
to its mass. This temperature is on the order about 4.3 million solar masses.
of billionths of a kelvin for black holes of stel-
lar mass, making it essentially impossible to On 11 February 2016, the LIGO collabora-tion
observe. Objects whose gravitational fields are announced the first direct detection of gravita-
too strong for light to escape were first con- tional waves, which also represented the first
sidered in the 18th century by John Michell observation of a black hole merger. As of De-
and Pierre-Simon Laplace. The first mod- cember 2018, eleven gravitational wave events
ern solution of general relativity that would have been observed that originated from ten
characterize a black hole was found by Karl merging black holes (along with one binary
Schwarzschild in 1916, although its interpreta- neutron star merger). On 10 April 2019, the
tion as a region of space from which nothing first ever direct image of a black hole and its
can escape was first published by David Finkel- vicinity was published, following observations
stein in 1958. Black holes were long considered made by the Event Horizon Telescope in 2017
a mathematical curiosity; it was during the of the supermassive black hole in ulMessier 87’s
1960s that theoretical work showed they were galactic centre.
a generic prediction of general relativity. The
discovery of neutron stars by Jocelyn Bell Bur-
nell in 1967 sparked interest in gravitationally
collapsed compact objects as a possible astro-
physical reality.
LATEX 2ε THE BLACK HOLE

II History stood at the time. In 1924, Arthur Edding-ton

showed that the singularity disappeared after
The idea of a body so massive that even a change of coordinates, although it took until
light could not escape was briefly proposed 1933 for Georges Lemaıtre to realize that this
by astronomical pioneer and English clergy- meant the singularity at the Schwarzschild ra-
man John Michell in a letter published in dius was a non-physical coordinate singularity.
November 1784. Michell’s simplistic calcu- Arthur Eddington did however comment on
lations assumed such a body might have the the possibility of a star with mass compressed
same density as underlinethe Sun’s, and con- to the Schwarzschild radius in a 1926 book,
cluded that such a body would form when a noting that Einstein’s theory allows us to rule
star’s diameter exceeds underlinethe Sun’s by out overly large densities for visible stars like
a factor of 500, and the surface escape velocity Betelgeuse because ”A star of 250 million km
exceeds the usual speed of light. Michell cor- radius could not possibly have so high a density
rectly noted that such supermassive but non- as the sun. Firstly, the force of gravitation would
radiating bodies might be detectable through be so great that light would be unable to escape
their gravitational effects on nearby visible from it, the rays falling back to the star like a
bodies. Scholars of the time were initially ex- stone to the earth. Secondly, the red shift of the
cited by the proposal that giant but invisible spectral lines would be so great that the spec-
stars might be hiding in plain view, but enthu- trum would be shifted out of existence.
siasm dampened when the wavelike nature of Thirdly, the mass would produce so much curva-
light became apparent in the early nineteenth ture of the space-time metric that space would
century. close up around the star, leaving us outside (i.e.,
If light were a wave rather than a ”corpuscle”, nowhere).”
it is unclear what, if any, influence gravity
would have on escaping light waves. Modern In 1931, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
physics discredits Michell’s notion of a light calculated, using special relativity, that a non-
ray shooting directly from the surface of a rotating body of electron-degenerate matter
supermassive star, being slowed down by the above a certain limiting mass (now called the
star’s gravity, stopping, and then free-falling Chandrasekhar limit at 1.4 M) has no sta-
back to the star’s surface. ble solutions. His arguments were opposed
by many of his contemporaries like Edding-
ton and Lev Landau, who argued that some
yet unknown mechanism would stop the col-
1 General relativity lapse. They were partly correct: a white
dwarf slightly more massive than the Chan-
In 1915, Albert Einstein developed his theory drasekhar limit will collapse into a neutron
of general relativity, having earlier shown that star, which is itself stable. But in 1939,
gravity does influence light’s motion. Only a Robert Oppenheimer and others predicted
few months later, UKarl Schwarzschild found a that neutron stars above another limit (the
solution to the Einstein field equations, which Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit) would col-
describes the gravitational field of a point mass lapse further for the reasons presented by
and a spherical mass. A few months after Chandrasekhar, and concluded that no law of
Schwarzschild, Johannes Droste, a student of physics was likely to intervene and stop at
Hendrik Lorentz, independently gave the same least some stars from collapsing to black holes.
solution for the point mass and wrote more Their original calculations, based on the Pauli
extensively about its properties. This solu- exclusion principle, gave it as 0.7
tion had a peculiar behaviour at what is now
called the Schwarzschild radius, where it be-
came singular, meaning that some of the terms
in the Einstein equations became infinite. The
nature of this surface was not quite under-
LATEX 2ε THE BLACK HOLE

M; subsequent consideration of strong

forcemediated neutron-neutron repulsion
raised the estimate to approximately 1.5 M
to 3.0 M. Observations of the neutron star
merger GW170817, which is thought to have
generated a black hole shortly afterward, have
refined the TOV limit estimate to 2.17 M.
Oppenheimer and his co-authors inter-
preted the singularity at the boundary of the
Schwarzschild radius as indicating that this
was the boundary of a bubble in which time
stopped. This is a valid point of view for ex-
ternal observers, but not for infalling observers.
Because of this property, the collapsed stars
were called ”frozen stars”, because an out-
side observer would see the surface of the star
frozen in time at the instant where its collapse
takes it to the Schwarzschild radius.

III Reference
”Black hole” - Wikipedia