Comment by itishappy

Comment by itishappy 10 months ago

1 reply

> Just by symmetry, shouldn’t it blueshift on the way in, gain some preposterous amount of energy — enough that it can escape?

Escape requires a certain critical speed (escape velocity), and light always travels at the speed of light regardless of it's energy, so light's ability to escape a black hole is not energy dependent. At some radius (the event horizon), space itself falls into a black hole faster than the speed of light, and that's sets a hard limit on everything's ability to escape.

Past the event horizon physics get weird. Time becomes finite and ends for all observers at a point in the future called the singularity. Everything falls towards this point, gaining preposterous amounts of energy. "Preposterous" here means infinite energy, and infinite density, really just a whole lot of infinities. Those infinities are problematic, and mean there's probably something non-infinite and uniquely interesting going on in there, but since nothing can escape the event horizon we'll likely never know.

thehappypm 10 months ago

Here’s something else that I’m concerned with with about black holes. If a mass is one nanogram below that of a black hole, how similar is it to a black hole?