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Black hole singularity is a surface not a point

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21590
38•raattgift•1h ago

Comments

sigmoid10•1h ago
Should be pointed out that this is a critique of common popsci journalism tropes and not a fancy new research result. Anyone who has taken a graduate level class in General Relativity would have been able to tell you the same.
kwoff•44m ago
Or read Susskind's "The Theoretical Minimum: General Relativity". For a non-spinning blackhole at least, not only is the singularity not a point, it is a surface in time, not space (as the book explains, the space and time coordinates switch places as you cross the event horizon).
Certhas•1h ago
As is nicely visualised by it's Penrose Diagram, e.g.

https://jila.colorado.edu/~ajsh/insidebh/penrose_schw.gif

shagie•48m ago
Some PBS Space Time episodes featuring the Penrose Diagram (in order - the first two are from 9 years ago, the last from 6)

What Happens at the Event Horizon? - https://youtu.be/mht-1c4wc0Q

Escape The Kugelblitz Challenge - https://youtu.be/v3hd3AI2CAA

Mapping the Multiverse - https://youtu.be/4v9A9hQUcBQ

moralestapia•18m ago
Sorry man, that's not what this is about.
Certhas•5m ago
It's not? Schwarzschild has a space-like singularity. That's the wiggly horizontal line at the top left of the diagram. If you are in the black hole you can't avoid hitting it. Seems to be exactly what the paper is remarking on.
Eridanus2•1h ago
Contains 08 rendered frames of a free falling observer's view while crossing the event horizon. This is not reddit, but plz someone animate it :}
ck2•56m ago
what's really going to blow your mind is

while you probably assumed or knew spinning black holes move space around them

spinning black holes also move TIME around them

* https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ady9068

so in theory a spinning black hole that's been around for billions of years has a time drag around it in a path that is billions of years old

(no we can't navigate it because yes that would be time travel to the past and violates causality)

black holes are just so weird with every new detail even more weird

oddly more interesting to me to try to grasp neutron stars (densest objects before black holes and are still visible, our entire solar system in a neutron star would be only 10km 6.2miles across)

srean•25m ago
Consider the magnetar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetar

"A magnetar's 10^10 tesla field, by contrast, has an energy density of 4.0×1025 J/m3, with an E/c2 mass density more than 10,000 times that of lead."

jamesforestwest•53m ago
Interesting work. The idea that the singularity is a surface rather than a point was unexpected to me even though it seems to follow logically from the theory of relativity. I wonder how this reconciles with quantum gravity. If the singularity is truly a two-dimensional surface, perhaps it's related to Hawking radiation and the thermodynamics of black holes?
dekdrop•37m ago
How does one descr blackhole to a non-physicist without losing much accuracy? I just it of a very-dense-object.
icepush•36m ago
A one-way door in space.
crooked-v•34m ago
The problem there is that not even the physicists completely agree on the details, because we know black holes definitely exist, but every explanation breaks one rule or another that should apply from different disciplines. It's part of why they get so much ongoing attention.
lazide•31m ago
Black holes are essentially where our knowledge of spacetime breaks, and we can’t even see into it. It’s hard to really concretely know much about it directly.
pantulis•7m ago
It's a region of space from where not even light can scape.

You can get a region like that by squashing a lot of mass in a small space, like happens when a star collapses under its own gravity. So here the intuition of "high density" makes sense.

But at the center of galaxies you have the so called "supermassive black holes" which are more or less comparable in size to the solar system and yes, they have a lot of mass but they are not very dense, a pop-sci trope is comparing it's density to cotton candy or even the air we're breathing right now.

So it's a matter of how you distribute mass/energy in a given diameter, not exactly of density.

Groxx•10m ago
Well... yeah? That's describing the event horizon. It's a term roughly as widely used as "singularity".

Talking about the inside of a black hole is indeed rather pop-misunderstood though, yes. But it's not like physicists are especially confident about the details either. Theoretical astrophysics changes a lot as time goes on and our instruments improve, and it's a rather hard field to do experiments on to get better data quicker.

dboreham•8m ago
Isn't that how we're inside one.

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Black hole singularity is a surface not a point

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21590
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