The Schwarzschild (Exterior) Solution

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SUMMARY

The discussion centers on the Schwarzschild Solution and its singularity at r=0, which is valid outside the gravitational mass of a black hole. Participants clarify that while the Schwarzschild metric describes the exterior of a black hole, the singularity at r=0 is a real feature of the solution, not merely a coordinate artifact. The conversation emphasizes the importance of Kruskal-Szekeres coordinates for understanding the entire spacetime without singularities and discusses the implications of matching interior and exterior solutions to create non-singular black hole models.

PREREQUISITES
  • Understanding of the Schwarzschild Solution in General Relativity
  • Familiarity with Kruskal-Szekeres coordinates
  • Knowledge of singularity theorems in spacetime
  • Basic concepts of black hole physics and event horizons
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  • Study Kruskal-Szekeres coordinates for a comprehensive view of black hole spacetime
  • Explore the implications of Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems
  • Investigate non-singular interior solutions for black holes
  • Learn about the BKL solution and its relevance to non-rotating black holes
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Physicists, astrophysicists, and students of general relativity seeking to deepen their understanding of black hole structures and singularities.

  • #31
evanallmighty said:
Well, there might not be, but unless I am mistaken, I have read some pretty convincing scientific papers trying to do what I want to do.

My guess is that you mis-understood some part of them. This area has been well established since the early 1970s.
 
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  • #32
Ok PAllen... I think I have it! (And yes, the scientific papers I have read are very vague and I probably did miss something)

If I find a perfect fluid interior solution and the Schwarzschild exterior solution, I can paste them smoothly together above the event horizon in order to develop a non singular static spherical black hole model. The event horizon is still there and everything... right? Still a black hole?

Now... It doesn't seem as straight forward to paste them ABOVE the event horizon as AT the event horizon... hmmm I hate to keep asking things, but do you have any more information on that?
 
  • #33
So I googled "nonsingular black hole" and via Hossenfelder et al's http://arxiv.org/abs/0912.1823 came across

http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9612057
Regular Black Holes and Topology Change
Arvind Borde
(Submitted on 20 Dec 1996)
Abstract: The conditions are clarified under which regular (i.e., singularity-free) black holes can exist. It is shown that in a large class of spacetimes that satisfy the weak energy condition the existence of a regular black hole requires topology change.


http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9911046
Regular Black Hole in General Relativity Coupled to Nonlinear Electrodynamics
Eloy Ayón-Beato, Alberto García (CINVESTAV-IPN, Mexico)
(Submitted on 11 Nov 1999)
The first regular exact black hole solution in General Relativity is presented. The source is a nonlinear electrodynamic field satisfying the weak energy condition, which in the limit of weak field becomes the Maxwell field.

Let me post again some references on the singularity theorems, so we can see how they are evaded.
Winitzki http://sites.google.com/site/winitzki/index/topics-in-general-relativity, section 4.1
Senovilla http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0605007

Edit: They evade the theorem in Winitzki's section 4.1.7 by not having a noncompact Cauchy surface.
 
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  • #34
evanallmighty said:
Well, there might not be, but unless I am mistaken, I have read some pretty convincing scientific papers trying to do what I want to do.

If I'm following the thread correctly, the Hawking Penrose theorems have been mentioned as obstacles. They don't say that you can't do it, they DO say you need "exotic matter" that violates one of the energy conditions to do it. (the Penrose theorem requires the weak energy condition to be violated, I'm not as familar with the other theorems mentioned).

Perhaps you don't care, but a little disclaimer that you know you are violating these energy conditions your statements will go over much better, even more so if you give some motivation for why these energy conditions would be violated other than "I want to do this and they're getting in the way".
 
  • #35
pervect said:
Perhaps you don't care, but a little disclaimer that you know you are violating these energy conditions your statements will go over much better, even more so if you give some motivation for why these energy conditions would be violated other than "I want to do this and they're getting in the way".

Yes, I know about the energy conditions. I'm just asking about this and learning more about it because I am very interested in learning about non singular black holes. Here's a cool article that got me interested in asking PF this:
http://koberlein.main.ad.rit.edu/journal/2009/12/non-singular-black-holes.php

It's pretty cool.
 
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  • #36
By the way everyone, I apologize if any of my questions/comments seem elementary at times, I am only 13. So I'm just letting you all know. Although the physics level for my age is pretty low, I do understand a lot, so I hope now that I have told you all you won't give me too much of an elementary explanation. (example-I have understood (with some thinking) mostly everything we have talked about so far)

But yes, Pervect, the reason why I am asking all these questions is because I want to, in the future, create a static, spherically symmetrical non singular black hole model (Schwarzschild) and right now I am just gathering as much information as I can. I plan to find the solutions I need (and the information) and as I learn to read and understand them better, although it might be obsolete by then, create my own non singular model. Yes, I know that sounds like a very specific thing to do and a great undertaking for me to even think about(because I know I sound like I don't know what I'm talking about-sorta), but I have learned a lot in the past year (I am surprised at how elementary I was not to long ago) that I think in the near future I will understand this fairly well.
I know it is not as simple as the article I posted earlier says, but I am just making it a long term goal, so I hope nobody will criticize that. And please, if you have bad criticism, just don't post it, if you want to help me with pursuing my career, or this project, than do. (I hope that didn't sound rude or anything)

Thanks for everyone's help thus far! I am going to read all the links suggested for now... but I probably will have some more questions!
 
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  • #37
I suppose my only questions for now are about patchwork above the event horizon.
 
  • #38
evanallmighty said:
This might be a silly question to people who are have more practice in this subject, but how does the Schwarzschild Solution/metric have a singularity at r=0 if it is only valid outside the gravitational mass (black hole)? wouldn't that be in the interior solution, describing the inside of a Schwarzschild black hole, where the gravitational singularity is actually located? I thought the only "singularity" in the exterior was the coordinate singularity at the event horizon.

I think there is a terminology issue here. Most texts seem to refer to the exterior Schwarzschild solution as the vacuum region outside the spherical mass in question. The interior solution covers the non-vacuum region inside the spherical mass and the border between the two regions is not necessarily the event horizon. At the risk of getting the terminology wrong myself because I am going from distant memory, I think you are referring to the external solution (outside the event horizon) and the internal solution (inside the event horizon). These have to be patched together by choosing a suitable integration constant so that world-lines are continuous are continuous across the boundary. There is also the issue of complex numbers and how imaginary numbers are physically interpreted.

Anyway, in conclusion, the exterior Schwarzschild solution for a fully formed black hole includes the region inside and outside the event horizon and all regions that are vacuum which covers infinity>= r >0m because all the mass is considered to be located at r=0m. Hope that makes some sort of sense :P
 
  • #39
yuiop said:
I think there is a terminology issue here...
infinity>= r >0m because all the mass is considered to be located at r=0m. Hope that makes some sort of sense :P

I have difficulties understanding what you mean by r=0m, does r have mass units? I thought r was the radial coordinate.
 
  • #40
TrickyDicky said:
I have difficulties understanding what you mean by r=0m, does r have mass units? I thought r was the radial coordinate.

I'm sorry, I was being sloppy and using units such that the gravitational constant G=1 and the speed of light c=1. The event horizon is located at r = 2GM/c^2. When multiplied out, G*M/c^2 has units of length and many texts use 2M as shorthand for 2GM/c^2. Similarly some casual texts the entropy of black hole is S = A/4 but it actually:

S_{BH} = \frac{kAc^3}{4G\hbar}

when the units are not fully expressed, but that is not so snappy.
 
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  • #41
This very interesting discussion motivated me to try to understand more about topology change in GR. I found this paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9406053

They say that topology change isn't kinematically impossible; you can only prove it doesn't happen by imposing dynamical constraints like the EFE.

"Geroch [5, 6] has shown that topology change may be obtained in these cases only at the price of causality violations, and Tipler [7, 8] has shown that Einstein’s equation cannot hold (with a source with non-negative energy density) on such spacetimes if the spatial topology changes."

They're generalizing the Geroch and Tipler results. They assume something they call "causal compactness," and which they consider a very mild physical condition. Their definition is this. Let I(p) be the set of all points that can be connected to p by a timelike curve; a spacetime is causally compact if the closure of I(p) is compact for all p.

Their interpretation is that causal compactness restricts how you can make arbitrary cuts and holes in spacetime, and that if a spacetime is causally compact, then no point p can 'receive signals from, or send signals to, either regions at infinity or "holes" in the spacetime.'

I don't understand this; doesn't this mean that Minkowski space isn't causally compact? If I pick a point p in Minkowski space, the closure of I(p) is simply its light cone, including the lightlike boundary. This isn't compact.
 
  • #42
I have not been following this thread at all, but I have taken a quick look at Borde's paper.
bcrowell said:
I don't understand this; doesn't this mean that Minkowski space isn't causally compact? If I pick a point p in Minkowski space, the closure of I(p) is simply its light cone, including the lightlike boundary. This isn't compact.

Right, this set isn't compact, but this isn't the type of set that Borde has in mind. Consider any two spacelike hypersurfaces in Minkowski spacetime. The open subset of Minkowski spacetime that lies between these two hypersurfaces is itself a spacetime, and is an example of what Borde calls (an interpolating) spacetime M. Note that M is not all of Minkowski spacetime. Now consider a p in M, and I(p) in M. The closure of I(p) is compact.

In figure 5, spacetime M lies between S1 and S2, and the shaded area, together with the lines that enclose shaded area, is the closure of I(p).
 
  • #43
Ah, I see -- thanks, George!

-Ben
 
  • #44
yuiop said:
I think there is a terminology issue here. Most texts seem to refer to the exterior Schwarzschild solution as the vacuum region outside the spherical mass in question. The interior solution covers the non-vacuum region inside the spherical mass and the border between the two regions is not necessarily the event horizon. At the risk of getting the terminology wrong myself because I am going from distant memory, I think you are referring to the external solution (outside the event horizon) and the internal solution (inside the event horizon). These have to be patched together by choosing a suitable integration constant so that world-lines are continuous are continuous across the boundary. There is also the issue of complex numbers and how imaginary numbers are physically interpreted.

Anyway, in conclusion, the exterior Schwarzschild solution for a fully formed black hole includes the region inside and outside the event horizon and all regions that are vacuum which covers infinity>= r >0m because all the mass is considered to be located at r=0m. Hope that makes some sort of sense :P

So what your saying is the exterior solution describes all of the black hole, and the interior solution describes all of the black hole, sorta? Then if that's true, why would there be an exterior AND an interior solution? According the Brian Koberlein: (http://koberlein.main.ad.rit.edu/journal/2009/12/non-singular-black-holes.php ), "you need the interior (inside the event horizon) and the exterior (outside the event horizon) solutions" to create a non singular black hole model.
In an email I received from him, he said: "Ideally we would like a unique solution that describes both the interior and exterior, but we don't have such a solution yet." So how is the exterior solution describing r=0? I'm not questioning you, just wondering.

Wow, this discussion has been quite a hit!
 
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  • #45
evanallmighty said:
So what your saying is the exterior solution describes all of the black hole, and the interior solution describes all of the black hole, sorta? Then if that's true, why would there be an exterior AND an interior solution? According the Brian Koberlein: (http://koberlein.main.ad.rit.edu/journal/2009/12/non-singular-black-holes.php ), "you need the interior (inside the event horizon) and the exterior (outside the event horizon) solutions" to create a non singular black hole model.
If you read carefully what yuiop wrote, he is using "exterior" and "external" with different meanings, and incompatibly with Koberlein's use.
 
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