Comment by itishappy

Comment by itishappy a year 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 a year 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?