Thursday 8 August 2013


History

Schwarzschild black hole
Simulation of gravitational lensing by a black hole, which distorts the image of a galaxy in the background (larger animation)
The idea of a body so massive that even light could not escape was first put forward by geologist John Michell in a letter written to Henry Cavendish in 1783 of the Royal Society:
If the semi-diameter of a sphere of the same density as the Sun were to exceed that of the Sun in the proportion of 500 to 1, a body falling from an infinite height towards it would have acquired at its surface greater velocity than that of light, and consequently supposing light to be attracted by the same force in proportion to its vis inertiae, with other bodies, all light emitted from such a body would be made to return towards it by its own proper gravity.
—John Michell[4]
In 1796, mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace promoted the same idea in the first and second editions of his book Exposition du système du Monde (it was removed from later editions).[5][6] Such "dark stars" were largely ignored in the nineteenth century, since it was not understood how a massless wave such as light could be influenced by gravity.[7]

General relativity

In 1915, Albert Einstein developed his theory of general relativity, having earlier shown that gravity does influence light's motion. Only a few months later, Karl Schwarzschild found a solution to Einstein field equations, which describes the gravitational field of a point mass and a spherical mass.[8] A few months after Schwarzschild, Johannes Droste, a student of Hendrik Lorentz, independently gave the same solution for the point mass and wrote more extensively about its properties.[9][10] This solution had a peculiar behaviour at what is now called the Schwarzschild radius, where it became singular, meaning that some of the terms in the Einstein equations became infinite. The nature of this surface was not quite understood at the time. In 1924, Arthur Eddington showed that the singularity disappeared after a change of coordinates (see Eddington–Finkelstein coordinates), although it took until 1933 for Georges Lemaître to realize that this meant the singularity at the Schwarzschild radius was an unphysicalcoordinate singularity.[11]
In 1931, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar calculated, using special relativity, that a non-rotating body of electron-degenerate matter above a certain limiting mass (now called theChandrasekhar limit at 1.4 solar masses) has no stable solutions.[12] His arguments were opposed by many of his contemporaries like Eddington and Lev Landau, who argued that some yet unknown mechanism would stop the collapse.[13] They were partly correct: a white dwarf slightly more massive than the Chandrasekhar limit will collapse into a neutron star,[14] which is itself stable because of the Pauli exclusion principle. But in 1939, Robert Oppenheimer and others predicted that neutron stars above approximately three solar masses (the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit) would collapse into black holes for the reasons presented by Chandrasekhar, and concluded that no law of physics was likely to intervene and stop at least some stars from collapsing to black holes.[15]
Oppenheimer and his co-authors interpreted 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 external observers, but not for infalling observers. Because of this property, the collapsed stars were called "frozen stars",[16] because an outside observer would see the surface of the star frozen in time at the instant where its collapse takes it inside the Schwarzschild radius.

Golden age

In 1958, David Finkelstein identified the Schwarzschild surface as an event horizon, "a perfect unidirectional membrane: causal influences can cross it in only one direction".[17] This did not strictly contradict Oppenheimer's results, but extended them to include the point of view of infalling observers. Finkelstein's solution extended the Schwarzschild solution for the future of observers falling into a black hole. A complete extension had already been found by Martin Kruskal, who was urged to publish it.[18]
These results came at the beginning of the golden age of general relativity, which was marked by general relativity and black holes becoming mainstream subjects of research. This process was helped by the discovery of pulsars in 1967,[19][20] which, by 1969, were shown to be rapidly rotating neutron stars.[21] Until that time, neutron stars, like black holes, were regarded as just theoretical curiosities; but the discovery of pulsars showed their physical relevance and spurred a further interest in all types of compact objects that might be formed by gravitational collapse.
In this period more general black hole solutions were found. In 1963, Roy Kerr found the exact solution for a rotating black hole. Two years later, Ezra Newman found the axisymmetricsolution for a black hole that is both rotating and electrically charged.[22] Through the work of Werner Israel,[23] Brandon Carter,[24][25] and David Robinson[26] the no-hair theorem emerged, stating that a stationary black hole solution is completely described by the three parameters of the Kerr–Newman metricmassangular momentum, and electric charge.[27]
At first, it was suspected that the strange features of the black hole solutions were pathological artifacts from the symmetry conditions imposed, and that the singularities would not appear in generic situations. This view was held in particular by Vladimir BelinskyIsaak Khalatnikov, and Evgeny Lifshitz, who tried to prove that no singularities appear in generic solutions. However, in the late 1960s Roger Penrose[28] and Stephen Hawking used global techniques to prove that singularities appear generically.[29]
Work by James BardeenJacob Bekenstein, Carter, and Hawking in the early 1970s led to the formulation of black hole thermodynamics.[30] These laws describe the behaviour of a black hole in close analogy to the laws of thermodynamics by relating mass to energy, area to entropy, and surface gravity to temperature. The analogy was completed when Hawking, in 1974, showed that quantum field theory predicts that black holes should radiate like a black body with a temperature proportional to the surface gravity of the black hole.[31]
The term "black hole" was first publicly used by John Wheeler during a lecture in 1967. Although he is usually credited with coining the phrase, he always insisted that it was suggested to him by somebody else. The first recorded use of the term is by a journalist Ann Ewing in her article "'Black Holes' in Space", dated 18 January 1964, which was a report on a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.[32] After Wheeler's use of the term, it was quickly adopted in general use.

Properties and structure

The no-hair theorem states that, once it achieves a stable condition after formation, a black hole has only three independent physical properties: masscharge, and angular momentum.[27] Any two black holes that share the same values for these properties, or parameters, are indistinguishable according to classical (i.e. non-quantum) mechanics.
These properties are special because they are visible from outside a black hole. For example, a charged black hole repels other like charges just like any other charged object. Similarly, the total mass inside a sphere containing a black hole can be found by using the gravitational analog of Gauss's law, the ADM mass, far away from the black hole.[33] Likewise, the angular momentum can be measured from far away using frame dragging by the gravitomagnetic field.
When an object falls into a black hole, any information about the shape of the object or distribution of charge on it is evenly distributed along the horizon of the black hole, and is lost to outside observers. The behavior of the horizon in this situation is a dissipative system that is closely analogous to that of a conductive stretchy membrane with friction and electrical resistance—the membrane paradigm.[34] This is different from other field theories like electromagnetism, which do not have any friction or resistivity at the microscopic level, because they are time-reversible. Because a black hole eventually achieves a stable state with only three parameters, there is no way to avoid losing information about the initial conditions: the gravitational and electric fields of a black hole give very little information about what went in. The information that is lost includes every quantity that cannot be measured far away from the black hole horizon, including approximately conserved quantum numbers such as the total baryon number and lepton number. This behavior is so puzzling that it has been called the black hole information loss paradox.[35][36]

Physical properties

The simplest black holes have mass but neither electric charge nor angular momentum. These black holes are often referred to as Schwarzschild black holes after Karl Schwarzschild who discovered this solution in 1916.[8] According to Birkhoff's theorem, it is the only vacuum solution that is spherically symmetric.[37] This means that there is no observable difference between the gravitational field of such a black hole and that of any other spherical object of the same mass. The popular notion of a black hole "sucking in everything" in its surroundings is therefore only correct near a black hole's horizon; far away, the external gravitational field is identical to that of any other body of the same mass.[38]
Solutions describing more general black holes also exist. Charged black holes are described by the Reissner–Nordström metric, while the Kerr metric describes a rotating black hole. The most general stationary black hole solution known is the Kerr–Newman metric, which describes a black hole with both charge and angular momentum.[39]
While the mass of a black hole can take any positive value, the charge and angular momentum are constrained by the mass. In Planck units, the total electric charge Q and the total angular momentum J are expected to satisfy
Q^2+\left ( \tfrac{J}{M} \right )^2\le M^2\,
for a black hole of mass M. Black holes saturating this inequality are called extremal. Solutions of Einstein's equations that violate this inequality exist, but they do not possess an event horizon. These solutions have so-called naked singularities that can be observed from the outside, and hence are deemed unphysical. The cosmic censorship hypothesis rules out the formation of such singularities, when they are created through the gravitational collapse of realistic matter.[40] This is supported by numerical simulations.[41]
Due to the relatively large strength of the electromagnetic force, black holes forming from the collapse of stars are expected to retain the nearly neutral charge of the star. Rotation, however, is expected to be a common feature of compact objects. The black-hole candidate binary X-ray source GRS 1915+105[42] appears to have an angular momentum near the maximum allowed value.
Black hole classifications
ClassMassSize
Supermassive black hole~105–1010 MSun~0.001–400 AU
Intermediate-mass black hole~103 MSun~103 km ≈ REarth
Stellar black hole~10 MSun~30 km
Micro black holeup to ~MMoonup to ~0.1 mm
Black holes are commonly classified according to their mass, independent of angular momentum J or electric chargeQ. The size of a black hole, as determined by the radius of the event horizon, or Schwarzschild radius, is roughly proportional to the mass M through
r_\mathrm{sh} =\frac{2GM}{c^2} \approx 2.95\, \frac{M}{M_\mathrm{Sun}}~\mathrm{km,}
where rsh is the Schwarzschild radius and MSun is the mass of the Sun.[43] This relation is exact only for black holes with zero charge and angular momentum; for more general black holes it can differ up to a factor of 2.
source:wikipedia

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