Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology => Topic started by: kiamerious on 15/02/2011 05:20:05
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Has anyone explored the idea that gravity flows out of a black hole?
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Has anyone explored the idea that gravity flows out of a black hole?
If the higs particle carries gravity to all atoms and there sub atomic parts then could a singularity be the point at which the higs enters our universe?
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The breaking of the higgs field is responsible for mass - it is not postulated that it is responsible for the transmission of gravity; that is the graviton. The graviton is (is thought to be) a massless gauge boson of spin 2 - whilst the higgs is (is thought to be) massive boson of spin zero. If they are one and the same then the standard model is in more trouble than even its staunchest critics have thought.
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I am not sure what you mean by gravity "flowing out" of a black hole. Black holes are often giving wild characteristics that make them seem like something they are not (i.e. an actual hole in space). Black holes are extremely massive "clumps" in space that have such a strong gravitational pull so that nothing can avoid them if inside the region called the event horizon. Light is bent by gravity and the blackhole bends light so greatly that it cannot escape. I picture black holes as a very compact(dense), massive, light capturing point in space.
However, if the higgs does exist, it certainly should be created in the highly energetic processes in or around a black hole. Also, jets of radiation are emitted from around a black hole. Look up accretion disc.
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Thanks for the replies. I also see black holes as very dense clumps in space. AS the higs needs a highly energetic field to be produced, then is it not possible that the singularity is itself a byproduct of the higs coming into being?
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No one knows how gravity works in quantum mechanics, but the Higgs mechanism doesn't require black holes to be created, so far as we know. The theory actually says that there's a field everywhere out there (even if no black holes existed) that gives things inertial mass (the kind of mass that makes something resist moving when you push it), and this field is called the Higgs field. The Higgs particle is just something you can create if you put the proper amount of energy into this field through the right quantum interactions.
By the way, there's nothing terribly special about the gravity of a black hole once you get far enough away. If we replaced the sun by a black hole of the same mass, we'd feel the same gravitational pull here on earth, and our orbit wouldn't change. The difference would happen when you got close enough to be within what's currently the sun's surface and the major difference would happen when you passed within the event horizon and approached the singularity. But at our distance, the gravitational field would be exactly the same with the sun there or not. (Of course, a black hole would be black, so we'd have no sunlight.)
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Absolutely true on all accounts, although the pull of the black hole sometimes would be significantly greater than one sun (depending on how massive it is). The distance of the event horizon is also called the Schwarzschild radius if anyone wants to read up on it. But, basically, this is the distance at which light could not escape if all the mass of something was inside that distance. It varies depending how massive the object is.
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It is always important to remember to keep the scale of things in perspective. The size of a black hole' event horizon is just a linear function of it's mass and a one solar mass black hole is about one mile across. The most massive black holes known at the centre of large elliptical galaxies are no bigger than our solar system out to the planet neptune.
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I would think some of the Hawking radiation would be in the visible range, so the black hole wouldn't really be black, actually. What do you all think?
(Hawking radiation is a phenomenon predicted by Stephen Hawking in which virtual particles appear near the black hole event horizon due to quantum fluctuation. Ordinarily, this is going on everywhere all the time, but the virtual particles immediately resolve back into the "quantum foam". When they occur near the event horizon, sometimes one of the particles will wander into the event horizon before they can resolve and the partner particle will be left unable to resolve because its balance has fallen into the black hole and it will travel off into space as Hawking radiation. Thus, black holes aren't quite black as they actually do produce some radiation.)
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If I remember correctly, Hawking Radiation does not occur in very large amounts at all and thus is basically unobservable.
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Hawking radiation from normal sized (greater than one solar mass) black holes is most definitely well below the visible range. It is amost exclusively electromagnetic and its peak energy is at a wavelength approximately equal to the diameter of the hole that is a one solar mass radio would radiate in the long wave radio band at around 200 KHz larger black holes would be in the audio frequency range and the very largest at frequencies of one cycle every few hours.
for a black hole to radiate visible light it has to be very much smaller say around 100 nanometres and even then it would be very dim radiating only about one tenth of a microwatt mind you it weighs around one hundred thousanth of the mass of the earth say around the weight of an asteroid about 50 miles across.
If you want to look up the properties of black holes go to http://xaonon.dyndns.org/hawking/
Mind you a tiny black hole like this takes around 10^25 times the current age of the universe before it evaporates.
Most people just do not start appreciate the true scale of the numbers involved with black holes and the size of the universe in general.