4 ms·
Ignoring the "atomic mechanics" and "spacetime travel" parts, what you're describing is roughly what might be seen by an external observer, far from the black h
by pierrec 2y ago
Ignoring the "atomic mechanics" and "spacetime travel" parts, what you're describing is roughly what might be seen by an external observer, far from the black hole. From the ship's point of view, passing the event horizon happens (and in the case of a large-enough black hole, could be quite uneventful). This puzzle is all about reconciling those two points of view, and exploring intermediate points of view. If you're trying to describe things from a single authoritative point of view, of course, there is no such thing (although here's the disclaimer: I am also not an astrophysicist)
- readyplayernull 2y agoGranted. Thinking twice, BHs move in space really fast, for example when they orbit other BHs. Meaning their mass is not frozen in time, otherwise these will elongate or rip apart. So the time dilation wouldn't be have such big effect, and atoms might not be compacted too much?
- raattgift 2y agoBHs move in space pretty slowly! Singleton black holes from collapsed stars move in their galaxy about the same as uncollapsed star: on the order of 200 km/s or so (faster towards the middle but still in the disc where motion is roughly circular around the galaxy's centre, slower in the bulge where motion is randomly around the galaxy's centre). Really unusually high-velocity stars move about 65-100 km/s faster than these, which is still not that fast, and "hypervelocity stars" (we've seen some twenty, compared to the 100 billion or so stars in our galaxy) move about only five to ten times faster still, but we're still at only about a thousandth of the speed of light. Black hole binaries can be arbitrarily wide, even up to many thousands of light-years, taking hundreds of thousands of years or more to orbit each other, possibly at speeds comparable to those of stars in galaxies. MEERKAT just announced its pulsar timing array results which focuses on orbital periods of some tens of years ("nanohertz gravitational waves"), which means not moving very fast. Here's a nice cartoon: https://physics.aps.org/articles/v16/116 https://physics.aps.org/articles/v16/116 LIGO is sensitive to much higher frequencies, once a black hole binary's mutual orbit has shrunk considerably - at the final chirp, they are moving at double-digit percentages of the speed of light and the orbital periods are in the milliseconds. In that regime black hole horizons do have bumps raised on them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1M-AbWIlVQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1M-AbWIlVQ The black holes can't rip apart though: everything inside stays inside. I'm afraid I can't figure out what you're talking about in terms of frozen in time, time dilation, or atoms compacting.