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The stiff-to-soft-to-stiff phase transition in the neutron star is probably microscopic black holes popping into existence and evaporating via Hawking radiation

The stiff-to-soft-to-stiff phase transition in the neutron star is probably microscopic black holes popping into existence and evaporating via Hawking radiation where convection creates zones dense enough to collapse for a moment: https://www.vttoth.com/CMS/physics-notes/311-hawking-radiation-calculator https://www.vttoth.com/CMS/physics-notes/311-hawking-radiati... If we switch the units to kg, we see that a mass of 278000 kg (139 metric tons) has a lifetime of about 1 second. That's a rounding error for something with a mass of the sun, or 2x10^30 kg. I wonder if there's a black hole oscillating in and out of existence at the center of neutron stars, creating a resonance that might be detectable. Also as a thought experiment, we could imagine dropping 1 more atom into a neutron star on the brink of total collapse. The star would start running down the "drain" of the black hole, red shifting away from us beneath its event horizon. We'd see it grow redder and redder, dimmer and dimmer as it recedes from us, while staying the same size due to the holographic effect of black holes. If we jumped in after it, the red shift would stay the same because we could never reach the star, but we'd experience severe tidal forces until we're ripped into spaghetti. Our clock would stay synced with an observer on the outside as we fall along the geodesic without outside forces acting upon us. Space just gets added between particles, which creates the red shift. I believe that passing the singularity means coming out the other side in a white hole exploding outward like the inflation at the start of our Big Bang, but nobody knows. We're just not good at thinking about space expanding at faster than the speed of light yet. That might limit the spaghettification to some proportion of the event horizon radius and make the journey survivable for atoms in a billion solar mass black hole, but who knows.

was_a_dev 4y ago
Is that a particulary studied concept or a hypothesis on your part?
- zackmorris 4y ago
  It's just an idea I've been noodling on that hinges on Hawking radiation existing and having the same formula regardless of whether a black hole is standalone or has matter falling into it. The radiation would form an outward force not just through light pressure, but by space rebounding out to balance anything trying to fall in. I'd like to see better proofs around stuff like neutron degeneracy pressure and the strong force. Electron degeneracy pressure is straightforward to understand from quantum mechanics, but I don't know if there's direct measurement of the strength of neutron repulsion from particle accelerators. Maybe the value they're using is empirical from the stars they've observed. The way I think of it now is that neutron stars evaporate too, so if one is on the brink of collapse, we'd have to add enough mass to overcome that rate of loss and also get the black hole lifetime long enough that it goes into runaway collapse. Otherwise its mass will go back to decreasing slowly. Although if you look at the note at the bottom of the link, it states that objects heavier than 0.75% of Earth's mass are growing heavier due to absorbing the cosmic microwave background energy. So maybe all neutron stars eventually collapse on their own trillions of years from now. Some other interesting ideas come out of that, like the center of a neutron star is probably nearly frozen in time as it withstands the flow of space into it. Like in the movie Interstellar where every hour on the water planet equates to 7 years in orbit. Or here on Earth where GPS systems have to compensate for time running slower for us on the surface. The center would also be nearly infinitely contracted by its Lorentz transformation, so the space around it would look thin to us outside but be normal thickness from its point of reference. So in a very real way, there's more space inside the star than we see from its radius. So much in fact that the center can be thought of as being nearly infinitely far away, even lightyears away. So spaghettification may make it so neighboring neutrons don't feel as squeezed along the radial axis as those nearer to the surface. Or maybe there's a stagnation line where gravity forms a dimple in spacetime, but if the density gets too high, the line advances inward until it reaches the center and tears through to form a singularity. But see, we'd have to wait an eternity for the tear to occur from our frame of reference, which suggests that black holes never actually form. They just get deeper and slower, mimicking black hole physics if we think of them as a black box, but behaving differently inside than our intuition suggests. I think modern physicists tend to prune ideas too early as being untenable or already explored. So they haven't thought through these sorts of edge cases enough. For example, we may not be able to actually reach a singularity by falling in. It's so small that we may end up missing and orbiting instead. That might have ramifications for quantization of the strong force or could explain why mass forms clouds instead of collapsing into points, and relate to String Theory (which I'm not fond of, but is worth mentioning). I have so many basic questions like these that it's hard to reason about this stuff without it feeling like hand waving. And since nobody can point to a definitive answer, these lines of questioning are still valid and worth pursuing IMHO. Edit: I'm still not entirely sure about the 4th paragraph and how distance to the center works. If we think of neutrons near the center as sitting on platforms, nearly frozen in time, and we could fall in without hitting anything (like a neutrino) then when would we reach the sitting neutrons? Would it take a long time to get to them (lightyears), or would we sail on past (in about 1/10 of a light second) with our clock synced to someone outside since we never hit anything?
josteink 4y ago
> If we switch the units to kg, we see that a mass of 278000 kg (139 metric tons) I’m admittedly no astrophysicist, but I’m pretty sure you mean 278 metric tons. 1 metric ton is 1000 metric kilos. We metricists like things simple :)
- beebeepka 4y ago
  Yes, this must be a new take on metric, which is the only tons I have ever used. Maybe their conversion went wrong. Does the math work the weird American tons?
  - zaarn 4y ago
    The commenters is probably using ChatGPT to compose the reply, it's notorious for mathematical mistakes.
- zackmorris 4y ago
  Thank you, you're right! 278 metric tons it is.
jiggawatts 4y ago
Something I've always wondered about is how do black holes form, specifically? E.g.: Do they grow outward from a point? A true mathematical point, or a tiny by finite highly curved region? Does the matter "fall in", or does the event horizon "expand to encompass the existing matter"? Does the observer's perspective matter? I.e.: is there a scenario where from one frame there is a black hole seen but from another frame it's just very dense stuff?
- consilient 4y ago
  > Do they grow outward from a point? A true mathematical point, or a tiny by finite highly curved region? The latter, where "tiny" for a stellar black hole is on the order of kilometers. > Does the observer's perspective matter? I.e.: is there a scenario where from one frame there is a black hole seen but from another frame it's just very dense stuff? An outside observer will never actually see light emitted at the moment the black hole forms: the infalling matter will just appear more and more heavily redshifted until it becomes undetectable.
comprambler 4y ago
Good thought experiment. I wonder if pulsars similarly arise from that regular cycle of blackhole formation on a bit larger scale. I would expect some physical expansion and contraction to correlate. As for the fabric/whitehole idea, I am in that camp if wormholes are a provably a thing, than hawking radiation over cosmic timescales could cause the eventual death of the singularity. Though if wormholes are provably a thing, then whiteholes would just be the other end. I wonder the black hole object fully evaporates or are there chunks of ancient black holes just floating around.
hinkley 4y ago
Sounds like neutron stars “simmer”.
dbdoskey 4y ago
FYI your thought experiment shows up in one of the latter books of The Expanse series, and is used in an interesting way, that I wont give away here.
throw0101c 4y ago
> we see that a mass of 278000 kg (139 metric tons) Tangent: would not 278000 kg be 278 metric tons, i.e., tonne? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonne
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
lostmsu 4y ago
My poor internal physicist thinks this is unlikely. When you read about density of black holes, it is often mentioned that the supermassive ones aren't very dense (in the sense of mass/Schwarzschild volume). I take it the smaller a black hole is, the higher its density must be. Therefore it should be unlikely for much smaller parts of a star that does not form a black hole as a whole to become black holes as they must achieve much higher density than that of the star.

was_a_dev 4y ago

Is that a particulary studied concept or a hypothesis on your part?

zackmorris 4y ago
It's just an idea I've been noodling on that hinges on Hawking radiation existing and having the same formula regardless of whether a black hole is standalone or has matter falling into it. The radiation would form an outward force not just through light pressure, but by space rebounding out to balance anything trying to fall in. I'd like to see better proofs around stuff like neutron degeneracy pressure and the strong force. Electron degeneracy pressure is straightforward to understand from quantum mechanics, but I don't know if there's direct measurement of the strength of neutron repulsion from particle accelerators. Maybe the value they're using is empirical from the stars they've observed. The way I think of it now is that neutron stars evaporate too, so if one is on the brink of collapse, we'd have to add enough mass to overcome that rate of loss and also get the black hole lifetime long enough that it goes into runaway collapse. Otherwise its mass will go back to decreasing slowly. Although if you look at the note at the bottom of the link, it states that objects heavier than 0.75% of Earth's mass are growing heavier due to absorbing the cosmic microwave background energy. So maybe all neutron stars eventually collapse on their own trillions of years from now. Some other interesting ideas come out of that, like the center of a neutron star is probably nearly frozen in time as it withstands the flow of space into it. Like in the movie Interstellar where every hour on the water planet equates to 7 years in orbit. Or here on Earth where GPS systems have to compensate for time running slower for us on the surface. The center would also be nearly infinitely contracted by its Lorentz transformation, so the space around it would look thin to us outside but be normal thickness from its point of reference. So in a very real way, there's more space inside the star than we see from its radius. So much in fact that the center can be thought of as being nearly infinitely far away, even lightyears away. So spaghettification may make it so neighboring neutrons don't feel as squeezed along the radial axis as those nearer to the surface. Or maybe there's a stagnation line where gravity forms a dimple in spacetime, but if the density gets too high, the line advances inward until it reaches the center and tears through to form a singularity. But see, we'd have to wait an eternity for the tear to occur from our frame of reference, which suggests that black holes never actually form. They just get deeper and slower, mimicking black hole physics if we think of them as a black box, but behaving differently inside than our intuition suggests. I think modern physicists tend to prune ideas too early as being untenable or already explored. So they haven't thought through these sorts of edge cases enough. For example, we may not be able to actually reach a singularity by falling in. It's so small that we may end up missing and orbiting instead. That might have ramifications for quantization of the strong force or could explain why mass forms clouds instead of collapsing into points, and relate to String Theory (which I'm not fond of, but is worth mentioning). I have so many basic questions like these that it's hard to reason about this stuff without it feeling like hand waving. And since nobody can point to a definitive answer, these lines of questioning are still valid and worth pursuing IMHO. Edit: I'm still not entirely sure about the 4th paragraph and how distance to the center works. If we think of neutrons near the center as sitting on platforms, nearly frozen in time, and we could fall in without hitting anything (like a neutrino) then when would we reach the sitting neutrons? Would it take a long time to get to them (lightyears), or would we sail on past (in about 1/10 of a light second) with our clock synced to someone outside since we never hit anything?

josteink 4y ago

> If we switch the units to kg, we see that a mass of 278000 kg (139 metric tons) I’m admittedly no astrophysicist, but I’m pretty sure you mean 278 metric tons. 1 metric ton is 1000 metric kilos. We metricists like things simple :)

beebeepka 4y ago
Yes, this must be a new take on metric, which is the only tons I have ever used. Maybe their conversion went wrong. Does the math work the weird American tons?
- zaarn 4y ago
  The commenters is probably using ChatGPT to compose the reply, it's notorious for mathematical mistakes.
zackmorris 4y ago
Thank you, you're right! 278 metric tons it is.

jiggawatts 4y ago

Something I've always wondered about is how do black holes form, specifically? E.g.: Do they grow outward from a point? A true mathematical point, or a tiny by finite highly curved region? Does the matter "fall in", or does the event horizon "expand to encompass the existing matter"? Does the observer's perspective matter? I.e.: is there a scenario where from one frame there is a black hole seen but from another frame it's just very dense stuff?

consilient 4y ago
> Do they grow outward from a point? A true mathematical point, or a tiny by finite highly curved region? The latter, where "tiny" for a stellar black hole is on the order of kilometers. > Does the observer's perspective matter? I.e.: is there a scenario where from one frame there is a black hole seen but from another frame it's just very dense stuff? An outside observer will never actually see light emitted at the moment the black hole forms: the infalling matter will just appear more and more heavily redshifted until it becomes undetectable.

comprambler 4y ago

Good thought experiment. I wonder if pulsars similarly arise from that regular cycle of blackhole formation on a bit larger scale. I would expect some physical expansion and contraction to correlate. As for the fabric/whitehole idea, I am in that camp if wormholes are a provably a thing, than hawking radiation over cosmic timescales could cause the eventual death of the singularity. Though if wormholes are provably a thing, then whiteholes would just be the other end. I wonder the black hole object fully evaporates or are there chunks of ancient black holes just floating around.

hinkley 4y ago

Sounds like neutron stars “simmer”.

dbdoskey 4y ago

FYI your thought experiment shows up in one of the latter books of The Expanse series, and is used in an interesting way, that I wont give away here.

throw0101c 4y ago

> we see that a mass of 278000 kg (139 metric tons) Tangent: would not 278000 kg be 278 metric tons, i.e., tonne? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonne

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

lostmsu 4y ago

My poor internal physicist thinks this is unlikely. When you read about density of black holes, it is often mentioned that the supermassive ones aren't very dense (in the sense of mass/Schwarzschild volume). I take it the smaller a black hole is, the higher its density must be. Therefore it should be unlikely for much smaller parts of a star that does not form a black hole as a whole to become black holes as they must achieve much higher density than that of the star.