I understand all the factors involved in black hole theory. What I'm waiting for is a description of how a star turns into a black hole. I know it seems absurd, but the actual event, the process, of what happens, is amazingly difficult to find.
Even Wikipedia, which usually has some good sources, has no link to any paper or publication that simply describes what happens.
Anyone feel like trying to fill the gap? We have a star, in theory an old star, with a certain mass, and it goes from being a star, to being a little tiny black hole. How does that happen?
Yes yes, we all know the force of the internal fission/fusion/reaction, whatever, the big hot ball of gas, no longer can counter the force of gravity. So matter is compressed, by gravity.
At that special moment, when the whole thing collapses, what occurs? What happens to the atoms/molecules that the star is made of? What happens when atoms are crushed by gravity, so that they no longer are atoms? What happens to all the energy that special event causes to be released?
That is the interesting part. Especially in regards to what happens to spacetime.
In researching this, it was interesting to discover that before the term "black hole" was thought of, they were called "frozen stars". It was also interesting to find that the concept was around long before Einstein.
I don't really know why Jerome says Black Holes don't exist, or can't exist. Or why a thread about such a thing is so long and so busy.
But in researching the matter, something odd about the whole thing showed up.
These things seem to happen whenever we have a Cosmological "thing" that contains the word "dark".
Fair enough, for one we lack the unification or QM and gravity at this time, if it exists. So the issues of GR and SR don't translate from the macro scale to the QM scale and so from what layman's stuff I have read the two systems don't mesh because we don't have an application of quantum gravity. So at this time there are things used to describe the singularity that just make no sense to me, like 'space time foam''. So how something smaller than the plank scale can be called foam is beyond me. My guess is that it is the usual sort of QM vs. classical translation issue.
As for the construction of a black hole, if I understand the stellar theory right, which is unlikely, the star does not collapse into the black hole directly. Stars do a lot of cool stuff before the turn into really old stars. Which despite some people claims, produce a lot of strange observations. The star according to the theory goes through stages of collapse and fusion, where the internal heat pressure is no longer supported and the star shrinks until another threshold for fusion is reached and the star starts to fuse again, in one case making gas giants. In other cases just compressing and fusing again.
The dynamics get very complex, sometimes the new fusion produces a whole lot of energy that can not be gravitationally bound and instead of becoming a gas giant the star throws off its upper layers. Lack of fusion, compressions, fusion, upper layer blown off. Depending on factors I understand only vaguely this can go through many different forms and patterns, especially if the star is part of a close binary system.
Some stars become stable after they loose enough mass and become white dwarfs of some sort (most likely the dead type that just cool over time), others can go through these cycles repeatedly with all sorts of cool things happening, producing many things that sure look like plasma pinches and the like. So the star can become very chaotic , expanding, collapsing, not fusing, fusing in spots, fusing in shells, expanding rapidly in places, blowing off shells, blowing away little bits, blowing away huge bits. All very turbulent and chaotic in some cases.
So the star can bounce around quite a while in this star depending on it's mass, the fusion threshold and how much of it's matter gets blown away when higher energy fusion does occur. So to say the least the people who study planetary nebulae and the phases of stars lives have enough material to keep them busy for centuries. And so the chapter right before the final one is a mess, especially if you have star going through this chaos that has material coming from another star in a binary system.
And then there is the final chapter, the star reaches a point where is just can't fuses anymore and it undergoes it's final collapse (as if, the compression and expansion can be very chaotic, shrink expand a little, shrink some more) and some reach a point of stability where nothing more happens, they shrink and shrink and shrink and become stable. Then they cool off. (Unless of course they get more matter)
Then I am not sure where the cut offs are anymore, there are some stars that undergo nova or supernova due to collapse and the fusion of elements right below iron, the release of energy is very high and most of the upper star gets blown away.
But then strange things happen to that core, compression waves, fusion of elements past iron in the core and the blown away material in shock waves. And depending on the mass, you can get a neutron star or a black hole. So that is the chapter before the final chapter, I will see what I can find on the final one.
What are you looking for Robinson?