fosstodon.org is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Fosstodon is an invite only Mastodon instance that is open to those who are interested in technology; particularly free & open source software. If you wish to join, contact us for an invite.

Administered by:

Server stats:

11K
active users

My theory about black holes :)

Shut’up. I know, ‘am no physicist. And no scientist for that matter. That’s fine. I just had an idea and is likely to be wrong but it makes my brain giggle with curiosity.

Read the post. I just solved the black holes and dark matter mystery. hahaha #tromlive

www.tiotrom.com/2021/11/my-the…
My theory about black holes :)
social.trom.tfsocial.trom.tf | Search

@tio
AFAIK, the mass of a black hole is concentrated on a point called the singularity, this is the reason for its extreme gravitational pull. So for black holes to behave the way it does, it needs a singularity. Are you suggesting that this singularity is made of dark matter ?

How does this dark matter singularity become that foggy patches shown in the NASA Hubble map ? To me, this doesn't seem to solve dark matter but just complicates things even more, lol 😂

@futureisfoss Ah you mean "At the center of a black hole, as described by general relativity, may lie a gravitational singularity, a region where the spacetime curvature becomes infinite.". that's just a "may". :) So may-be they are wrong, or maybe the describe it weirdly. Or maybe it is but us still made out of dark matter :). Why is my theory making things more confusing if at the center of a black ball is such an immense gravitational pull that they call it a "singularity" point? :)

@tio
AFAIK, general theory of relatively is proven. I don't know if singularity makes space-time curvature infinitive, that's kinda confusing because infinity a theoretical. For example, we consider sun's rays as parallel even though its not at an infinite distance from earth, so the context matters.

@tio
Because I don't know the mathematics behind all this, I'm not sure which infinity they meant. Its possible that they meant the true theoretical infinity. I've heard the quote "black holes are where god divided by zero", so there's definitely some weird mathematics going on. I think Hawking radiation disproved that statement, IDK 🤔. Its been a while since I last heard about black holes, haha. Anyway, these things are weird AF, they're too dense for us to grasp ;)

@tio
> Why is my theory making things more confusing

Singularity is more like a point, so calling it a "ball" is kinda misleading. Also, there's a lot of unknowns about dark matter, you're just making a lot of assumptions here, that stars convert matter to dark matter when they explode, that black holes convert matter to dark matter when it swallows something, etc. There's no need to make it this complicated when you can explain everything using a singularity made of normal matter, not dark.

@futureisfoss To me makes more sense than a "hole" in the universe :D. wtf is a hole haha. Things "get in" but where do they go? These "holes" radiate and have a mass....they have other objects orbiting around them....they can collide with other "holes" and create bigger holes. Seems more weird to me than these are just another type of star, a black star with a gravitational pull so huge that even light can't escape.

@tio
Its not actually a hole, you know that right. It just pulls everything in to the singularity, that's just an extremely powerful gravity. And for where does this matter go, there are theories saying its like wormhole, so it spews everything it swallows somewhere else. There's also Hawking radiation, which is more widely accepted I think. It solves this information paradox, because it shows that black holes radiate away.

@futureisfoss Well they call it a hole...I know is not like a normal hole. But as far as I understand it doesn't spew what it swallows somewhere else since you can see it growing and account for the stuff it swallows. The Hawking radiation is simply a proof that they also lose "stuff". Stuff gets out. And probably that's normal matter since we can "see" it.

"It just pulls everything in to the singularity" - so you're saying it pulls stuff into that "point"? Then why are these black holes bigger, smaller, have a shape, a mass? I don't get it :D

@tio
"It just pulls everything in to the singularity" - so you're saying it pulls stuff into that "point"? Then why are these black holes bigger, smaller, have a shape, a mass?

I'm no expert, but from what I understand, what they mean by the size is the event horizon. The event horizon is a boundary inside which light can no longer escape. So intuitively, this event horizon should expand when the mass increases because gravity increases with mass.

@tio
BTW, from what I know about black holes, they don't have a shape. I've heard about spinning black holes, but never a cube/pyramid shaped one 😁

@futureisfoss Well we can't observer them, remember!? But we can observe the outer side of them when they have lunch, and we for sure see a disk-like shape. Which can, in fact be spherical.
Rokosun

@tio
Oh yeah, the singularity might be of any shape, we don't really know much about the inside, everything after the event horizon is just black

Most black holes I've seen in pictures and stuff have a spherical event horizon, and I think the disk you're mentioning is things orbiting these black holes that glow because of their heat, that video explained it. If the event horizon is spherical, the stuff inside should be spherical too right ? I don't know enough about gravitational fields to know

@futureisfoss
Oh yeah, the singularity might be of any shape, we don't really know much about the inside, everything after the event horizon is just black
Could also be that there is no such thing as singularity...
If the event horizon is spherical, the stuff inside should be spherical too right ?
Sounds right to me but how can we know :D. If I think about my black ball theory then yes haha.

@tio
> Could also be that there is no such thing as singularity...

Could be, but the mass of the black hole still has to exist somewhere inside the event horizon. The idea of a singularity is probably used to explain the extreme gravitational pull, maybe it'll have less space-time curvature if the mass is spread around VS on a densely packed point. So more space-time curvature means more gravity. I'm still not sure how scientifically proven this singularity thing is, this is my understanding.

@futureisfoss Isn't a star that's 1km in diameter and has 1 tonne mass, having the same gravitational pull of a star that's 10km in size and still 1 tonne?

@tio
Yeah you're right, the gravitational pull will only differ with mass and distance, I was thinking of the spacetime curvature analogy.

@tio
But if you think about it, size does make a difference. If you're falling into a 10km size star with 1 tonne mass, you'll experience the same gravitational pull as a 1km size star with the same mass. But remember, gravity increases when distance between you and the star reduces, so you'll keep on accelerating as you move closer to the star. So on a 10km size star, the closest you can get to it is 5km (its radius). But on a 1km size star, you can go up to 0.5km where gravity is stronger 🙂

@futureisfoss I think this video explains it well www.khanacademy.org/science/co… - if am object is much smaller but has the same mass, then an object can get closer so the gravity is much stronger. But now we know that even the black ball, what they call as event horizon , is much smaller than a star. So it is already insanely dense and small. Like crushing multiple stars in a few km round object. Now what they are saying from what I understand from you, is that this mass of a black hole is not that black disk we observe, but a tiny point in the middle. This sounds very insane haha. Might be true tho, but insane. My black ball theory sounds less insane in that regard :D
Khan AcademyWhy gravity gets so strong near dense objects (video) | Khan AcademyWhy Gravity Gets So Strong Near Dense Objects

@tio
That video is talking about the same thing I said earlier. So its confirmed, dense objects have higher gravity 🙂

> this mass of a black hole is not that black disk we observe, but a tiny point in the middle.

Of course, the event horizon is not a physical boundary like the boundary of a ball, its a point after which light can no longer escape from the gravity of the black hole. And gravitational field is always much larger than the size of the object, think about sun pulling on earth.

@futureisfoss
Of course, the event horizon is not a physical boundary like the boundary of a ball, its a point after which light can no longer escape from the gravity of the black hole.
At least thats what they theorize ;)
And gravitational field is always much larger than the size of the object, think about sun pulling on earth.
Same for a black hole, it extends far more than that dark disk (ball).

@tio

> At least thats what they theorize ;)

I don't know if its just a theory, what's happening inside a black hole we can't know, but we can observe the surroundings to prove that there's extreme gravity there that even light can't escape. Remember, light only moves in a straight line, but massive objects can bend the space-time curvature to bend its path. This has been proven, I recommend you look more into general theory of relativity, its very interesting :)

@futureisfoss hahaahha no no i am familiar with that. but maybe there is a very dense ball from which light can't escape, or maybe it is made out of dark matter and we don0t know wtf that is :).

@tio
youtube.com/watch?v=0sr1Xeocuu

I've been thinking about this video you sent me....... And I think I get it now, I understand why they theorized singularity to be a point. This is even more stranger & weirder than I thought, haha.

@tio
So when a star dies and it collapses under its own gravity, 3 things can happen. If the repulsion between electrons are able to prevent the collapse, then it becomes a white dwarf. If the repulsion between neutrons stop the collapse, then it becomes a neutron star. But if the star is too massive and even those nuclear forces can't stop the collapse, then there's no other force known to science that can stop it from collapsing on its own. So it collapses into an infinitely dense point !

@tio
Just think about that for a moment, this is one of the craziest shit I've ever heard, and its hard to believe these things actually exist ! 😲

Its really hard for me to grasp this concept, because its so different from everything I've experienced in my life. My intuition tells me that if more stuff gets sucked into the black hole, the singularity should get bigger. But it doesn't !

@tio
The reason why we can't compress everything into a point in real life is the same reason why I can't push my hand through the wall. The atoms/electrons in my hand repulses the atoms/electrons in the surface of the wall. But inside the black hole, the gravity is so strong that it overcomes these repulsion between atoms, so there's no other force to prevent it from collapsing into a point.

@tio
No matter how much stuff you throw into a black hole, the singularity will remain the same size. The mass of the black hole will increase and thus the gravity increases, so the event horizon will get bigger. But the actual size of the singularity won't increase, it'll just collapse everything into that infinitely dense point. This is just insane 🤯

@futureisfoss
My intuition tells me that if more stuff gets sucked into the black hole, the singularity should get bigger. But it doesn't !

Maybe it does....

@tio
I don't think it does, haha. I know its a little hard to understand but that's what makes black holes interesting, its not like anything we've seen before.

@futureisfoss That's what they "suppose" :). I agree that this may be the case, but considering they know very little about these things, speculation is still a toy we can safely play with.

@tio
Ofc, I get your point. I'm not saying that its "the truth", we can only speculate. I just meant that that's how I see black holes, and it makes the entire thing quite interesting for me ;)

@futureisfoss Yes but what if under that tremendous pressure it creates dark matter? :) I dont see that as a wild idea.

@tio
If you're saying tremendous pressure can turn matter into dark matter, yeah it sounds plausible. This would also explain why stuff pulled into the black hole also become dark matter, because one thing that black holes and a collapsing star have in common is pressure ;)

I still have some doubts as to what happens after it turns into dark matter, but considering how little we know about them I don't think there's any point in us arguing over what "might" be happening, lol 😅

@tio
That disk shape could also be something called "gravitational lensing" which happens around the event horizon. Its kinda weird TBH, crazy things start to happen when the gravitational pull is so high !

@futureisfoss Thanks for engaging I learned more things because of that. I wsn't aware that they are saying that a black hole is a black nothing but its mass is in a very dense center thats super small. I had the wrong impression that the black hole is the entire black thing. Maybe that's what made me think about it being a black ball. These two videos explain it well:

ytb.trom.tf/watch?v=poE8CuucCE…
ytb.trom.tf/embed/0sr1Xeocuuc

Although I will have to update my theory ( :)) ) it still may be wrong the way they are theorizing about it now. Maybe there's still a black ball instead of a black hole, and it is made of a different type of matter, maybe even dark matter.

You did great at explaining this, and I am very happy you have engaged in such a discussion :).

@tio
Those 2 videos are very good 👍

My confusion regarding this black balls theory is this:

1. Not even light can escape a black hole because its so dense that the gravity is in the extremes. But if it was a ball the same size (of event horizon), then it wouldn't be this dense and wouldn't have that much gravity

2. We don't even know if matter can become dark matter, let alone say that stars exploding will cause it. Its called dark matter cause we literally know nothing about it, lol 😂

@tio
Thank you for engaging as well, we could discuss these things for hours without getting bored, haha 😄

@futureisfoss
Not even light can escape a black hole because its so dense that the gravity is in the extremes. But if it was a ball the same size (of event horizon), then it wouldn't be this dense and wouldn't have that much gravity
Actually the one who first came up with this theory, a mathematician some 200 years ago, called it a dark/black star and proved mathematically you can have such a star where light can't escape it because it is so dense. And black holes are actually stars....same way a neutron star is still a star. They call it "hole" and make things confusing a lot :D.
We don't even know if matter can become dark matter, let alone say that stars exploding will cause it. Its called dark matter cause we literally know nothing about it, lol
Exactly. We don't even know if it is matter. But has similar properties with a black hole that's why they are thinking black matter can in fact be black holes. They both do not interact with light/matter so that we can't see them, and have a strong gravitational pull.

@tio

> Actually the one who first came up with this theory, a mathematician some 200 years ago, called it a dark/black star and proved mathematically you can have such a star

I didn't knew about that, interesting... 🤔
Also, keep in mind that this mathematician can be wrong, there has to be a reason we don't call it a star anymore. Einstein published general relativity in 1915, before that we didn't had a clear picture of how gravity worked.

@tio
Its possible for a star's gravity to bend light, this is actually how we proved general relativity. But a star's gravity is not strong enough that even light can't escape, if it were then it wouldn't be able to glow ;)

Also, when you call it a black ball, a dark planet comes to my mind. And I don't get how a planet can do what a black hole does. Even if your black ball was made of dark matter, the gravitational properties would be kinda the same as a normal ball.

@futureisfoss A "black hole" is a star. It is a collapsed star, same as a neutron star. So we can better call it a "dark star" or something like that. Now the properties of this dark star can be that its size are immensely small and dense, like the singularity of a black hole. Semantics. A dark star, or black ball like I call it, can be so dense that light can't even escape it. Why can't it be? Or can be that is made out of dark matter and combined with gravity it sucks in normal matter and converts it into dark matter.

A star doesn't have to glow. White dwarfs barely glow.

Take normal matter. A neutron star then the Venus planet. Both made out of normal matter. But the neutron star's gravitational pull is immense compared to the one of the planet Venus. Despite them being made out of the same matter. Why can't it be that dark matter that we observe scattered around the universe clump under tremendous pressures into a ball just like a neutron star, and have immense gravitational pull? :P

@tio
As long as we're talking about the singularity, the name we give to it doesn't matter. In my mind, I see stars as something that radiates energy, so its hard to call black holes a star. I know about hawking radiation, but its very different thing. In hawking radiation, none of the energy/matter that's released comes from the black hole itself.

From wikipedia: "A star is an astronomical object consisting of a luminous spheroid of plasma held together by its own gravity"

@tio
Its also hard for me to call singularity a "ball" because now I have a better understanding of why they theorized it to be point sized. Even if it wasn't point sized, I still find it hard to call something so tiny a "ball". Would you call atoms a "ball" ? IDK, sounds weird to me.

@tio
About dark matter, there is still the question of where that normal matter went ? If you're saying that normal matter turned into dark matter, then it would work AFAIK. But my question is "why ?". You're just adding an extra step to the whole process, there's no need for matter to become darkmatter for black holes to exist, so why make it more complicated ? 🤷

If scientists are looking into such theories, then they're probably doing it for entirely different reasons than us 😂

@futureisfoss
You're just adding an extra step to the whole process, there's no need for matter to become darkmatter for black holes to exist, so why make it more complicated ?
As explained in the article....it can solve 2 issues: 1. We understand what black balls are. And 2. It may explain how dark matter comes into existence.

Why would you invent the singularity (infinite point), or the "event horizon"? These are completely new things. To say that the blackness of a black hole is just stuff that we can't see because light can't escape the gravitational pull, is also an invention, isn't it?

@tio

> 2. It may explain how dark matter comes into existence.

I don't understand this point, that's why I asked this question:

> How does this dark matter singularity become that foggy patches shown in the NASA Hubble map ?

The gravity of a black hole is so strong that nothing can escape it, so how can dark matter escape it considering their gravitational properties are similar to normal matter ?

@tio
> To say that the blackness of a black hole is just stuff that we can't see because light can't escape the gravitational pull, is also an invention, isn't it?

I don't think its an invention, that's how we define black holes !
(AFAIK, We defined them even before finding one IRL)
From Wikipedia: "A black hole is a region of spacetime where gravity is so strong that nothing — no particles or even electromagnetic radiation such as light — can escape from it."

@futureisfoss Yes but that's still not fully demonstrated. It is an idea, that so far has some predictability. But so did so many other theories/ideas. It is a reason why I don't start to say that maybe atoms are just dark matter that absorb light, since we have "touched" the atom and humans have very well understood it so far. Not so for black holes.
AFAIK, We defined them even before finding one IRL
I was reading through the history of black holes and from what I got from it, at first it was theorized that there can be dark stars, as I said in other comments. So dense that light can't escape them.

@tio
If your theory proved to be right, they'll probably change the name from black holes to something like black balls (which you suggested) since it wouldn't fit the definition of a black hole. So instead of saying there's a black hole at the centre of every galaxy, they'll be saying there's a black ball there 😉

@futureisfoss And I explained: a normal star produces the chemical elements (atoms) we know of today. That means atoms made out of protons, neutrons and electrons. We understand that.

Now the same matter can form a cloud of gas that has a very weak gravitational pull, or under tremendous pressures a more dense object like a planet or a star, or a neutron star.

So, same matter, different "objects": from clouds of gas, to planets, asteroids, or stars of wildly different sizes and densities.

Why can't this be true for dark matter? What if dark matter is made out of different particles (atoms) and in most cases you see it as a sort of "gas" that still has a decent gravitational pull from my understanding, but at times under tremendous pressures it coalesces in the form of a star.

ofc this is pure speculation but an interesting thought experiment.

@tio
> in most cases you see it as a sort of "gas" that still has a decent gravitational pull from my understanding, but at times under tremendous pressures it coalesces in the form of a star.

Ofc, this is a possibility, I understand that. But my point here is that it can't go from a planet to a gas, only the other way around. So if you're saying all dark matter are created when black holes are born, be it a black ball/star, it'll never become that foggy patches shown in the NASA Hubble map.

@futureisfoss When a star becomes a neutron star it loses mass/energy in the process of collapsing, and those remains will transform into gas clouds of the normal matter that this star was made of. That's what my "brian" :) told me one night, maybe when a star becomes a dark star, it transforms matter into dark matter and it also shoots out this sort of dark matter when it collapses, like all stars do.

Also I find it bizarre that this super strange "point" (singularity) has a magnetic field like all stars have. As far as I understand it. It makes more sense for it to have a magnetic filed if it is a dark ball in my mind at least.

@tio

> When a star becomes a neutron star it loses mass/energy in the process of collapsing, and those remains will transform into gas clouds of the normal matter that this star was made of.

Ok, this is actually what I wanted to hear, now your theory is making more sense to me, and I understand it better now 😀

I just couldn't think of any way its mass could spread out, haha 😂
So the answer is a supernova explosion that spreads out the mass of these black balls that are made of dark matter.

@futureisfoss Yah well when a star becomes a black hole I suppose it loses mass in the process of collapsing, squashing all of those atoms in the process.
@futureisfoss I find it impossible to imagine it is a "point sized". What in the world does that mean? haha. Ofc this can be true, but I find this one to be so wild. Much wilder than perhaps it is a "dark star" made out of matter we do not grasp now.

@tio
Yes, you'll find it hard to imagine a point sized object cause its vastly different from anything we've ever seen. I don't know how to explain this, but I'll try. You just have to think about why a point sized object can't exist in our day to day life. If you think about it from the perspective of atoms and particles, then you'll understand that its because of the repulsion between these particles. Black holes are born when stars collapse that are massive enough to overcome all repulsions.

@tio

> Ofc this can be true, but I find this one to be so wild.

Yes, and that's what makes black holes interesting, they are wild 😀

@futureisfoss
Black holes are born when stars collapse that are massive enough to overcome all repulsions.
That's the theory. But we do not know for sure. Maybe there are all sorts of matter out there and forces. After all the normal physics and the quantum one are still not shaking hands from what I know. They had to invent a new kind of physics to explain those new particles.

@tio
A big factor for confusion here is that I'm not really sure how much of the stuff I've heard about black holes are just a theory vs how much is actually evidence based. Everytime I hear about black holes, I hear all of these same things, singularity, event horizon, etc.

One thing we both agree here is that our knowledge about the universe is limited. I'm not saying your theory can't be true, I'm just trying to explain why I find it confusing. Ofc, we have different POV about black holes 🙂

@tio
Its interesting you mentioned quantum mechanics, cause that's even crazier, haha

> They had to invent a new kind of physics to explain those new particles.

New physics ? Dude, quantum mechanics is literally MAGIC !

Did you know that they actually teleported data using quantum entanglement ? If this isn't magic, IDK what is......
youtube.com/watch?v=yb38jozeDO

@tio
Thanks, I'll take a loot at that. I like learning about quantum mechanics, its probably the most insane/craziest fields of science ever. It feels literally like magic to me, and I can't believe these things are REAL, I mean WTF ?

BTW, you can try doing the double slit experiment at home - youtube.com/watch?v=kKdaRJ3vAm
I'll do this one day when I buy a laser, a cheap one should be enough I think.

@futureisfoss Very cool I will try. I am not not confused by this at all!
@futureisfoss Atoms are different. We are talking here about a collapsed star, not atoms. But a group of atoms or some new kind of particles. A group of.

@tio
Atoms are spherical shaped and are made of even smaller sub particles, so its not that different from a star/planet (which is made of many small particles as well), atoms are just tiny.

I think of singularity as a point, its more exciting for me that way ;)

And considering how little we know about the universe, maybe the closest we can get to truth is to consider the latest science we know. Ofc, it can always be wrong, but that's just the best we can know from a scientific perspective 🙂

@futureisfoss Yes but as far as I know sub atomic particles do not "obey" the laws of physics. They had to come up with quantum physics to explain them. A star is different, on a different level. I get your point, but an atom is not a "point" either. And is not round either, of course. It is a wobbly thing with clouds of electrons around them, and a core made out of protons and neutrons.

@tio
Yeah, I was just trying to say how I can't call something so tiny like singularity a ball. Ofc, it'd be different if your theory is right and is actually a star/planet, then we can call it a ball. This is why I said we have different POV when we think about a black hole, the singularity comes to my mind but maybe a ball made of dark matter comes to your mind 🙂

@futureisfoss Stars do not have to be a "luminous spheroid of plasma", same way that what they call a planet should not necessarily be an object of X size that clears its orbiting path of debris/asteroids. Also, aren't moons same as planets?

@tio

> Also, aren't moons same as planets?

This is actually an interesting question. I think technically they're kinda the same, but we gave them different names just to make communication easier for us.

@futureisfoss We call it a blach "hole" because of a movie theater or something like that, which was called the "black hole". About a prison where inmates will go but never come back. Just like matter seems to go inside of these "black stars" and never come back. So the naming was quite random.

@tio
That's interesting, I didn't know that. I only have a rough idea of what black holes are, I don't know anything about its academic background 😁

@futureisfoss And ofc that mathematician could be wrong, same as Einstein, Hawking, and the rest.