2 ms·
As someone with no formal experience in astronomy (other than a college for kids course in the 80s), that has been my mental model. Just a large enough mass wit
by jonhohle 3y ago
As someone with no formal experience in astronomy (other than a college for kids course in the 80s), that has been my mental model. Just a large enough mass with enough gravitational force to bend light/prevent light from leaving. There’s no hole, just a name describing what was originally observed.
- Novosell 3y agoMind you, black holes require high (infinite) density, but can exist at arbitrary mass. It'll just be smaller.
- Sharlin 3y agoThis is the 1800s classical, pre-relativistic idea of a "black hole". But it is mostly a coincidence that if you plug an escape velocity equal to the speed of light to Newton's equations, you get a body with a mass and radius equal to the mass and event horizon radius of a black hole. But given the incredible predictive success of general relativity, there's little doubt that actual black holes are not just "dark stars" but fundamentally relativistic objects: regions of spacetime so warped that time becomes spacelike and space becomes timelike. Note that Kerr most definitely does not disagree; the entire point of the Kerr metric is that it's a solution (set of solutions) to the Einstein field equations.