I The proper Schwarzschild radial distance between two spherical shells

Click For Summary
The discussion focuses on calculating the proper Schwarzschild radial distance between two spherical shells using the metric ds² = - (1-rs/r) c² dt² + dr² / (1-rs/r), where rs = 2GM/c². The proper radial distance D is expressed as D = ∫r1r2 (1/(1-r/rs))¹/² dr, and the participants explore the implications of using Newtonian gravity equations versus the more complex Schwarzschild equations for estimating orbital motion errors. There is a particular interest in how these calculations relate to the escape velocity of objects in an expanding universe, with references to the McVittie metric as a potential solution for merging Schwarzschild and FLRW cosmologies. The conversation highlights the challenges of accurately incorporating the effects of cosmic expansion into gravitational calculations.
  • #31
Buzz Bloom said:
Hi Paul:

I found
https://www.physicsforums.com/threa...-iii-ch-8-resolution-of-vector-states.989615/.

Is this the lecture notes you are recommending?

Regards,
Buzz
No, what does Feynman have to do with Sean Carroll? The latter taught the standard GR course at MIT for a number of years and posted his detailed lecture notes on line. Many link to the arxiv version. However, I prefer the following link to the author's own website, which has all the content of the arxiv reference plus a bunch of useful ancillary material, including a 24 page synopsis, which is still fully mathematical:
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/grnotes/
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Likes Buzz Bloom
Physics news on Phys.org
  • #32
PAllen said:
No, what does Feynman have to do with Sean Carroll? ... plus a bunch of useful ancillary material, including a 24 synopsis, which is still fully mathematical:
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/grnotes/
Hi Paul:

I apologize for my carelessness. I did an Internet search of "Sean Carrol lecture notes" and found the right URL at the top of the list, but then I carelessly copied the URL for the next item on the list to include in my post.

When I look at the lecture notes page, I do not see anything about "a 24 synopsis". Can you explain a bit more about what that is and in what section I can find it?

Regards,
Buzz
 
  • #33
Buzz Bloom said:
Hi Paul:

I apologize for my carelessness. I did an Internet search of "Sean Carrol lecture notes" and found the right URL at the top of the list, but then I carelessly copied the URL for the next item on the list to include in my post.

When I look at the lecture notes page, I do not see anything about "a 24 synopsis". Can you explain a bit more about what that is and in what section I can find it?

Regards,
Buzz
It is in the fourth paragraph of the link I gave. A direct link is:
https://preposterousuniverse.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/grtinypdf.pdf
 
  • Like
Likes Buzz Bloom
  • #34
Buzz Bloom said:
If we assume
ΩR = ΩM = Ωk = 0​
and
ΩΛ=1,​
then

I assume this means you're interested in a case where there is no matter, no radiation, but only a cosmological constant.

This would be represented by the de-Sitter metric. With the addition of matter, so that you have a massive body in a space-time with a cosmological constant and an accelerating expansion, you'd have the De-Sitter Schwarzschild metric, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Sitter–Schwarzschild_metric, henceforth the DSS metric.

This would be a simpler alternative (or more precisely, one I happen to be familiar with) to using the McVitte metric, which is interesting, but I'm not familiar with it.

Using this DSS metric, we can get the answer without any questionable (and probably wrong) assumptions that GR is like Newton's theory.

We can find the r coordinate in this metric where an object stays stationary so that it's r coordinate does not change with time.

Specifically, looking at the Wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=De_Sitter–Schwarzschild_metric&oldid=959698099#Metric

we have the geodesic equation, and we want to solve for r=constant, which implies that ##\dot{r} = \ddot{r} = 0## and also ##\dot{\theta} = \dot{\phi} = 0##.

The geodesic equation has a solution of this form when ##f'(r)=0##, which implies
$$r = \left( \frac{a}{b} \right)^{\frac{1}{3}}$$

From the wiki, we have

The two parameters a and b give the black hole mass and the cosmological constant respectively.

So the a is proportional to the black hole mass, and b is proportional to the cosmological constant.

Note that the coordinates used for the DSS metric are not necessarily the same as the cosmological coordinates. There is surely some relationship between the two sets of coordinates, but I havean't seen any detailed exposition of what it is. However, we can make useful qualitative statements without the exact knowledge.

The qualitative statement we can make is that there is some critical radius r. At this critical radius, particles in geodesic motion (free fall) exist which do not get further away or closer to the black hole. Below the critical radius, particles in geodesic motion fall inwards, outside the critical radius they accelerate outwards.

There is an intuitive way of looking at this, involving the quantity ##\rho + 3P##. In the de-Sitter space-time, ##\rho## is positive and P = ##-\rho##. So the quantity ##\rho + 3P## is negative. It's a sort of mass density, called the Komar mass, that applies to any stationary space-times. The De-Sitter and the Schwarzschild De-sitter metric are both examples of stationary space-times, as can be seen by the fact that there is no time dependence of the metric coefficients. The more general FRW space-time is not stationary, unfortunately.

My intuitive way of looking at this is that the balance point where r=constant occurs when the positive mass of the black hole is balanced out by the effect of empty space, which has an effective negative mass due to the pressure term in the cosmological constant.

So the gravitational effect of the negative mass cancels out the positive mass at some specific radius, and you have a net zero effect at this particular radius. Inside this critical radius, particles will fall towards the black hole. Outside this critical radius, particles will accelerate away from the black hole.

Note that for this argument to work, we need to rely on the fact that the gravitational effect inside a hollow sphere is zero, which justifies why we only look at the contributions from the "mass" inside the sphere of radius r.

Like all intuitions, this somewhat vague description is a bit suspect, and I can't quote the exact source that gave me this idea, though it was a paper studying the DSS space-time. Nor can I say that my memory is necessarily good on this point.

While the provenance of this intuitive explanation is suspect, I thought it was useful enough an idea to share, even though it is much less rigorous than the argument I gave using the solution of the geodesic equation.
 
  • #35
pervect said:
This would be a simpler alternative (or more precisely, one I happen to be familiar with) to using the McVitte metric

The McVittie metric is a generalization of the Schwarzschild-de Sitter metric that allows the perfect fluid that is filling the universe (apart from the "mass" in the center) to be something other than pure dark energy. Basically, you can plug in any equation of state that is compatible with an FRW spacetime.

As far as the approach you are taking to the OP question (which is basically the same as what I briefly described in post #26), it will work just fine in a general McVittie metric; you just need to write the metric in Schwarzschild coordinates (instead of the isotropic coordinates it is more often written in).

pervect said:
Note that the coordinates used for the DSS metric are not necessarily the same as the cosmological coordinates. There is surely some relationship between the two sets of coordinates, but I havean't seen any detailed exposition of what it is.

The coordinates used on the DSS Wikipedia page you linked to are Schwarzschild coordinates; these correspond to static coordinates for the de Sitter metric, as described here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Sitter_space#Static_coordinates

"Cosmological coordinates" are any of the flat, open, or closed slicings described in that article.
 
  • #36
PAllen said:
The scale factor as function of time is part of several metric components. It is part of GR foundations that only curvature distinguishes local physics from SR.
...
Have you read any systematic treatment of GR? Sean Carroll’s online lecture notes develop everything from pretty basic starting point, yet develop the material using a pretty complete modern mathematical form.
Hi Paul:

I have started to read Sean Carroll’s online lecture notes, but I have found it difficult to make progeress in my understanding. i have not yet given up though, but I have given more attention to the McVittie metric

I think I understand that "The scale factor as function of time is part of several metric components," but I have not yet not grasps what are the "several metric components", in particular in the McVittie metric which I found on page 9 of the lecture notes
Black Holes in an expanding universe: the McVittie metric, by Daniel C. Guariento.
www.physics.ntua.gr/cosmo13/Paros2013/Talks/Guariento.pdf
McVitteMetric.png

Are the following two the components you intend as having the sclae factor as part of them?
a2
m/(2a rcap) (rcap represents here the r with the carat on top in the metric)​

Would you please explain the meaning of "local physics" as it is related to GR. I have seen this term used w/r/t quantum mechanics, but not GR.

Regards,
Buzz
 
  • #37
pervect said:
I assume this means you're interested in a case where there is no matter, no radiation, but only a cosmological constant.
...
This would be represented by the de-Sitter metric.
Hi pervect:

Thank you for your post.

One of several cases I am interested in is the one where there is no matter, no radiation, but only a cosmological constant. I have accepted the suggestion of @PeterDonis to work with the McVittie metric.

The thread
posts #43 through #49 is a further discussion of this topic.

Regards,
Buzz
 
  • #38
Buzz Bloom said:
I have accepted the suggestion of @PeterDonis to work with the McVittie metric.

Which, as I have already pointed out in other threads, is just the Schwarzschild-de Sitter metric for the case you describe, with zero matter, zero radiation, and only a cosmological constant.
 
  • #39
Some general comments that might help, from Ned Wright's cosmology FAQ, and some of my own comments:

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.html#SS

Ned Wright said:
Why doesn't the Solar System expand if the whole Universe is expanding?

This question is best answered in the coordinate system where the galaxies change their positions. The galaxies are receding from us because they started out receding from us, and the force of gravity just causes an acceleration that causes them to slow down, or speed up in the case of an accelerating expansion.

To be a bit more specific, I'll add my own comments. Without gravity, the expansion of the universe can be modeled as matter moving away from other matter at a constant rate. As Ned Wright says, cosmological expansion happens because things are moving away from each other. Gravity acts to slow down the expansion (usually), the weird exception being dark energy/ the cosmological constant, which speeds it up. It doesn't cause the expansion in the first place, though. That happens basically because things are moving away from each other. ##\Omega_m##, the contribution of matter and it's gravity, slows the expansion down. ##\Omega_r##, the contribution of radiation, also slows the expansion down. The only thing that causes the expansion to speed up is "dark energy", aka the cosmological constant.

Planets are going around the Sun in fixed size orbits because they are bound to the Sun. Everything is just moving under the influence of Newton's laws (with very slight modifications due to relativity). [Illustration] For the technically minded, Cooperstock et al. computes that the influence of the cosmological expansion on the Earth's orbit around the Sun amounts to a growth by only one part in a septillion over the age of the Solar System. This effect is caused by the cosmological background density within the Solar System going down as the Universe expands, which may or may not happen depending on the nature of the dark matter. The mass loss of the Sun due to its luminosity and the Solar wind leads to a much larger [but still tiny] growth of the Earth's orbit which has nothing to do with the expansion of the Universe. Even on the much larger (million light year) scale of clusters of galaxies, the effect of the expansion of the Universe is 10 million times smaller than the gravitational binding of the cluster.Also see the Relativity FAQ answer to this question.

So let me amplify on this, as well. If we look at the effect of dark energy specifically, the effect is static, it doesn't vary with time. So the effect of dark energy by itself is that it theoretically changes the size and orbital velocity of orbits by a tiny amount. WIth a large enough distance, the angular/tangential orbital velocity can even drop to zero, which was one of the questions I addressed in my last post.

Time variation of size of orbits doesn't come from an unchanging cosmological constant. We currently assume the cosmological constant is indeed constant, I'm not sure what if any experimental limits exist on this constant potentially varying with time. I don't think there's any theoretical reason why it should vary with time.

Size changes in orbits potentially occur from the other factors. These include matter leaving the solar system (as the sun radiates some of it's mass away), dark matter potentially leaving the solar system (this is something we have to theoretically model, we as of yet don't have any way to directly observe this). Thee effect that Ned Wright talks about, referencing Cooperstock, http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/9803097, which is I believe now the paper I was trying to recall. Currently the site seems to be down, though :(.You were also interested in the magnitude of the effect. Ned Wrigh provides some numbers about this . I believe some of the justification for these size estimates were in Cooperstock's paper, the one that I couldn't access.

The effect of matter to slow the expansion down can be more-or-less understood in Newtonian terms. If you don't mind a factor of a 2:1 error, radiation can be regarded as being pretty much like matter. Explaning the 2:1 factor requires going beyond Newton to GR.

The "Newton-friendly" approach to the effect of the cosmological constant is to imagine that empty space is pervaded with somethign akin to a negative Newtonian mass density, a sort of anti-gravity. This isn't really quite right, but it's tough to do better with a Newtonian mindset. If you want a better and more accurate explanation, you'll need to move beyond Newtonian thinking, which involves learning General Relativity. Then you can potentially see why pressure, and not just mass and energy, causes "gravity". This will explain the 2:1 discrepancy in the radiation terms as opposed to the matter terms, and it will also explain why the anti-gravity filling empty space has a positive energy density (but a negative pressure), and why that combination acts as "anti-gravity".
 
  • Like
Likes Ibix
  • #40
pervect said:
I don't think there's any theoretical reason why it should vary with time.
Hi pervect:

In what follows, ΩΛ represents the density of dark energy divided by the critical mass density. Using the equation below, which determines how a and H change with time, also implies that the Ω terms can also change with time.
FriedmannEqWithOmegas.png

What is given is the the sum of the four Ωs initial values, corresponding to a=1, must always equal 1. This implies that as a approaches ∞, ΩΛ approaches 1.

If for some value of a, da/dt=0 and da2/dt2=0, then for that value of a H is a constant, and the four Ωs are constants.

Regards,
Buzz
 
Last edited:
  • #41
Buzz Bloom said:
What is given is the the sum of the four Ωs initial values, corresponding to a=1, must always equal 1. This implies that as a approaches ∞, ΩΛ approaches 1.

No, it doesn't. The four ##\Omega## values do not change at all; they are constants. All of the time dependence is contained in the powers of ##a##. So what this equation is telling you is that, over time, all of the contributions except the dark energy one become negligible. Or, in terms of the Hubble Constant, ##H## approaches a constant value as ##t \rightarrow \infty##, often called ##H_{\infty}##, which is given by

$$
\frac{H_{\infty}^2}{H_0^2} = \Omega_\Lambda
$$

So if ##\Omega_\Lambda = 0.7## (which is, AFAIK, a reasonable value based on our best current data), then as ##t \rightarrow \infty##, we will have ##H^2 \rightarrow 0.7 H_0^2 = H_\infty^2##.

What might be confusing you is the fact that, if we pick a different time from today as the "now" to determine the values for the ##\Omega## constants, we will get different values for them. But if we pick a different time from today as our "now" to determine those values, we will also get a different value for ##H_0##.

For example, suppose we pick a time so far in the future that the only non-negligible contribution is dark energy, i.e., all of the ##\Omega## constants are practically zero except for ##\Omega_\Lambda##. This would mean ##\Omega_\Lambda = 1## if we picked that time as our "now" time, but it would also mean that our ##H_0## would be smaller, because it would be the value of the Hubble constant ##H## at that far future time, which would be ##\sqrt{0.7}## of the value it has today. So our equation would still end up telling us the same value for ##H## for that far future time, i.e., ##H_\infty##.

This also means that the actual dark energy density in that far future time is the same as it is now. The value of ##\Omega_\Lambda## will have changed if we pick that far future time as our "initial" time to determine the ##\Omega## constants, but the dark energy density itself will not.
 
  • #42
PeterDonis said:
No, it doesn't. The four ##\Omega## values do not change at all; they are constants.

Hi Peter:

I already have edited my post while you were writing your response. The following is the change I made.

Buzz Bloom said:
Using the equation below, which determines how a and H change with time, also implies that the Ω terms can also change with time.
Note that I changed "values" to "terms". In what you quoted, i underlined "initial values" to make this clear, but then I decided to also make the other change to make it even clearer.

Is this revision satisfactory?

Regards,
Buzz
 
  • #43
Buzz Bloom said:
Is this revision satisfactory?

No, it's wrong. Did you read my post?
 
  • #44
PeterDonis said:
This also means that the actual dark energy density in that far future time is the same as it is now. The value of ΩΛ\Omega_\Lambda will have changed if we pick that far future time as our "initial" time to determine the Ω\Omega constants, but the dark energy density itself will not.
Hi Peter:

Apparently I had another misunderstanding. To explain it I need I need to create a symbol for dark energy density, say ρDE.

First, perhaps my use of "critical mass density" is bad usage. How about ρc to represent the cosmological critical density.
ρc/ = 3H2/8πG

ΩΛ = ρDEc
While ρDE does not change with a and H, ΩΛ does change since ρc changes.

Note pervect's quote below.
pervect said:
Time variation of size of orbits doesn't come from an unchanging cosmological constant. We currently assume the cosmological constant is indeed constant, I'm not sure what if any experimental limits exist on this constant potentially varying with time. I don't think there's any theoretical reason why it should vary with time.
I suppose the misunderstand is based on the meaning of the pronoun "it" in the quote. (I bolded "it" for clarity.) I misunderstood understood "it". I mistakenly assumed it referred to ΩΛ rather than the cosmological constant ρDE.

I apologize for my misunderstanding.

Regards,
Buzz
 
Last edited:
  • #45
Hi Peter:

Thank you for your post. I may have made another mistake in my thought process, but I am definitely a bit confused about the math that would justify that the form of the Friedmann equation (see my post #40) does not remain the same if we choose a different time at which a = 1.

I said:
While ρDE does not change with a and H, ΩΛ does change since ρc changes.​

I think I have missed understood (and continue to misunderstand why) that the adjusted sum of the four Ωs does not remain equal to 1 if I chhose a different time at which a = 1. I believe (although I may be mistaken) that it is possible to create a new set of four Ωs at a later time and redefine a later value of a, say anew, to become anew=1. Why is this not possible for all situations except when H=da/dt=0.
If this is done, the calculated value of H corresponding to the new value of a, say anew, will become the new value of H0, say H0new. The new values for ΩR, ΩM, and Ωk, say ΩRnew, ΩMnew, and Ωknew, respectively become
ΩRnew = ΩR/a4,​
ΩMnew = ΩR/a3, and​
Ωknew = Ωk/a2.​
(I think I may be omitting another needed multiplier for each RHS, but I don't have the time now to explore that possibility.)
Then the new value of ΩΛ, say ΩΛnew becomes
ΩΛnew = 1 - ΩRnew - ΩMnew - Ωknew.​

If this is wrong, I hope you can help me understand the math that explains why.

Regards,
Buzz
 
Last edited:
  • #46
Buzz Bloom said:
I said:
While ρDE does not change with a and H, ΩΛ does change since ρc changes.

Ah, I misread your post before. Yes, this is correct.
 
  • Like
Likes Buzz Bloom

Similar threads

  • · Replies 11 ·
Replies
11
Views
2K
  • · Replies 7 ·
Replies
7
Views
2K
Replies
8
Views
1K
  • · Replies 11 ·
Replies
11
Views
2K
Replies
4
Views
3K
  • · Replies 18 ·
Replies
18
Views
2K
  • · Replies 11 ·
Replies
11
Views
3K
  • · Replies 6 ·
Replies
6
Views
2K
  • · Replies 55 ·
2
Replies
55
Views
8K
  • · Replies 13 ·
Replies
13
Views
3K