black holes

A thought just occurred to me, and I'm wondering if I can get a clear explanation as to why it wouldn't work: Two black holes, say of equal mass, pass near each other. Let's say so close that their event horizons just "touch". It seems to me that at that point of "contact" the space-time...

I was wondering what happens to acceleration as you approach the singularity of a black hole? Acceleration is dependent on gravity according to Newton. If gravity increases to infinity at the singularity what happens to an objects acceleration as it approaches the singularity? Would the...

Hooray! :D Europe: Proton beams circulate in Big Bang machine And we're all still alive - yippie!

One of the most unusual hypothesis I've heard about the disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle is that they are being caused by an underwater wormhole. Can this be scientifically possible? If no, why not?

If two black holes were orbiting each other at a very close distance, would they still be spherical, or would the event horizons become more drop-shaped, just like ordinary binary stars do?

A lot of people don't seem to like the idea of black holes. Understandable if you happen to run into one, but not if you simply wish to challenge the general validity of the idea. But whether you like the idea or not, it seems only reasonable that one should actually know what a black hole is...

Physicists describe a Black Hole, which is described as a singularity, as having high entropy or a high level of disorder. The singularity that gave birth o the universe is described as having low entropy or low disorder. Two Questions: 1. Why does a black hole (a singularity) have high...

"And the Collapse of Spacetime", by Stephen J. Crothers. Here is the URL to this 9-page PDF: http://www.wbabin.net/science/crothers6.pdf The abstract: It seems to be an attempt to show that General Relativity (GR) contains a fatal internal inconsistency. In terms of its stated scope, what...

OK, I was inspired by a blurb from a NOVA program by Dr. David Brin: here is the 30-second audio: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blackhole/expl-brin.html So. You have some kind of marvelous spacecraft that can set you a yard out from the event horizon of a singularity. You reach out and poke...

A friend of mine is running a space-based RPG, and turned to me for some scientific help. I, therefore, turn to you. He wants his villians to have a weapon that can use a black hole to destroy a planet. Now, I was able to tell him that such a black hole wouldn't need to be very big, and that...

I just read the most aggravating and stupid editorial on CERN about black holes. It's aggravating because it glosses over some aspects of the truth that would without a doubt prove Wagner is a crackpot. I would appreciate it if I could get some help to write a response to this editorial...

According to some, it is: http://cityhallblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2008/07/dallas-county-meeting-turns-ra.html Comments from a science blogger on why it would be bad for a white hole to appear near Dallas: http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/archives/2008/07/is_black_hole_a.html

I saw this interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson on MSN's Cosmic Log posted yesterday, and just thought I would share it. Helps to understand black holes for people like me, who have a limited exposure to astronomy and concepts within. Cosmic Log

Tokorona mentioned in chat that the CERN reactor start-up was delayed and that we all wouldn't die tomorrow. I had to ask, "Would we notice?" Isn't there some weird time dilation happening as something falls into a black hole? Would we live out our lives as we fell into the black hole? If...

In another thread, JEROME DA GNOME This thread is here for JEROME DA GNOME to present arguments that black holes do not exist, to show that they are "another made-up thought with no evidence" or that gravity is not strong enough to form black holes.

This question came up, in all things, during a Philosophy lesson I was in earlier today. We were discussing the nature of immaterial substances (i.e. Substances without mass) and how they couldn't affect the world. This was in relation to Mind/Body duality, specifically the 'Mind'. Anyway, I was...

For all the arguing we do about black holes, I'm saddened to read that their father has died. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/14/science/14wheeler.html

The International Herald-Tribune has an article about a lawsuit (in Hawaii) that is trying to obtain a temporary restraining order against CERN until it produces an environmental impact statement and a safety review, claiming the risk of the accidental creation of a black hole or other weird stuff.

So the ill-informed opposition to the LHC and particle accelerators in general due to the belief that they could initiate some catastrophic doomsday scenario is not new news. But it has gained some momentum as of late due to a lawsuit recently filed that is trying to block the LHC. Some of the...

Stephen Hawking will be at Caltech on April 9 at 8pm! Here's the info from the Caltech events site: Event website: www.events.caltech.edu/hawking I'll try to make it. Anyone want to meet up beforehand?

I'm currently teaching myself basic physics, and a strange thought occured to me while I was casually looking ahead in my textbook this afternoon. Please forgive me if what follows is a bit simplistic. I haven't studied the chapters on light yet! Okay, here goes ... If light passes by at a...

I would like to use this thread to have readers consider various "what if's" I have in mind about the universe and black holes. This is about pure speculation. Please bear in mind I'm only a layman when it comes to cosmology, astrophysics, etc.. I have a BA in Math from UCLA, with a minor in...

Okay... this briefly came up in the "Question about nothing" thread, but I promised to ask it in a separate thread so I didn't derail the original discussion. How is it possible for a rotating black hole to have two horizons???

At the penalty of sounding retarded... How do scientists know surely enough that Large Hadron Collider won't create a black-hole that will cause the whole earth to collapse into it? I know they said the same thing with another particle accelerator... but this one is significantly more...

This is another split from the plasma cosmology thread: There is the concept of the magnetospheric eternally collapsing object. Suggested by an astrophysicist Abhas Mitras and later used by Schild to explain observation of a quasar Q0957+561...

From what high school physics has taught me, the gravitational attraction in a singularity approaches infinity as its size approaches zero. This makes it impossible for anything to leave the black hole, except hawking radiation. But what if I kept pouring electrically charged particles down the...

Has anyone heard of this guy? He appeared in a BBC Radio 4 interview this morning (listen here for 7 days) and claims to have a realistic hypothesis for backward (and presumably forward) time travel, or at least time-messaging. He says he got into black holes as a specialism as a "cover" for his...

Question One - Various answers have been given, as to why Gravity is able to excape from a black hole - but none have addressed the fact that gravity has now been shown to travel at speed c. Question Two At speed c, time has dilated to zero - Therefore, from light's frame of reference...

Hello everybody, I know all sorts of weird things happen when you deal with extreme situations such as what goes on beyond the event horizon of a black hole, and it's ever harder as a layman to wrap my head around this phenomenon, so I hope I'll make sense and not annoy our resident...

Ok, having just watched a horizon program on Hawkings, the below equation is referred to as leading to Hawkings' theory re the information paradox - ie that information could be lost in a black hole. $$ S=\frac{kc^3A}{4\hbar G} $$ Where S= entropy of a black hole k=Boltzman constant c=speed of...