What is the shape of a black hole and how does it appear from behind?

[izzie]

Hello everyone!
I'm a student in the UK who just finished my GCSE's and I am very interesting in physics particularly quantum physics, though i have little knowledge of it. So a black hole is also called a "quantum singularity"? And it is an object with near infite mass and little/no volume (correct me if I am wrong). What i don't understand is, the shape of a black hole is like that of a funnel, with the singularity at the bottom of this funnel and an acceleration disc at the top, and this suggests its a 3d shape but is it. How can it be if the matter is being pulled into the singualirty and there is only one acceleration disc? Surely if you were to go around the back of a black hole it would appear empty? I don't know if i make sense and i know i sound stupid but I am just interested to find out.

Izz

 

[selfAdjoint]

In general relativity, which is non-quantum, the center of the black hole is just a classical singularity; the density goes to infinity there. But there is current effort to quantize GR gravity (see the subforum "Strings Branes and LQG" for news about that). And in some of these quantization programs, the singularity goes away, due to, for example, the operation of the uncertainty principle at short ranges.

 

[pervect]

Hello everyone!
I'm a student in the UK who just finished my GCSE's and I am very interesting in physics particularly quantum physics, though i have little knowledge of it. So a black hole is also called a "quantum singularity"? And it is an object with near infite mass and little/no volume (correct me if I am wrong). What i don't understand is, the shape of a black hole is like that of a funnel, with the singularity at the bottom of this funnel and an acceleration disc at the top, and this suggests its a 3d shape but is it. How can it be if the matter is being pulled into the singualirty and there is only one acceleration disc? Surely if you were to go around the back of a black hole it would appear empty? I don't know if i make sense and i know i sound stupid but I am just interested to find out.

Izz

To address some other points - non-rotating black holes are really spherical. The funnel shape that you see associated with them is an embedding diagram, not what they really look like.

For a description of what the term "embedding diagram" means, and a java applet, see

http://www.opensourcephysics.org/talks/osp_curriculum/applet_html/embedding.html

 

[izzie]

the applet doesn't load but, so that means that the singularity is at the core of a black hole? thanks anyway, now i feel stupid

delete this topic someone

 

[pervect]

Chill out a bit, izzie - having your browser fail to load a java applet may be a bummer and a bit frustrating, but it doesn't make you stupid.

 

[professor]

it looks like the specific type of black hole that you are speaking of is a classical swarzchild black hole (i hope i spelled his mane right) in such an instance there would be a conained singularity, and this could be described in such a way as you have mentioned, though this is only one theory, not all include the necessity of a singularity

 

[professor]

and ohh yeah, in such a case the singularity would be at the core of a black hole and would most likely consist of a mainly neutron comprised matter

 

[amt]

From the diagram applet, it seems like the singularity bottoms out when the Mass=1.

What's happening there? Is 1 some critical point?

 

[pervect]

When M=1, the object becomes a black hole. The embedding diagram then stops at the event horizon, where the equations used to derive it become singular. (This is the coordinate singularity at the event horizon, not to be confused with the true physical singularity at r=0).