The discussion centers around the nature of black holes, specifically whether matter falling into a black hole reaches the singularity or forms a massive shell around it. Participants explore concepts related to gravity, relativistic mass, time dilation, and the behavior of objects near black holes, touching on both theoretical and conceptual aspects.
Participants express multiple competing views regarding the behavior of matter near black holes and the implications of relativistic effects. The discussion remains unresolved, with no consensus reached on whether matter actually reaches the singularity or forms a shell.
Some limitations include the dependence on definitions of black holes and relativistic mass, as well as unresolved mathematical steps related to time dilation and gravitational effects.
em370 said:Are singularities actually finitely dense? The basis of the singularity is that gravity is so strong that the object contracts without stopping and will never slow down as their is nothing to stop it( I could be wrong in this as shown by my previous immense lack of understanding). Will it really become infinitely dense or do we just say that because it will continue getting denser and denser to the point where it would no longer make any sense or even matter to measure the density? I read something on the internet about the Schwarzschild radius but I think it was talking about the size of the event horizon instead of the actual singularity.
Vorde said:The easy way out is to say that a singularity has a finite mass and an infinite density.
However we don't have a good mathematical description of a singularity, so we don't really know.