The original question was: Aside from Hawking radiation, is it possible to destroy a black hole? Specifically, could you rotate a black hole fast enough that it was flung apart? Also, assuming that m is the mass necessary for a black hole (though I realize they’re more a density than mass thing), and you had a black hole of, say, 10m, could you throw some amount of anti matter at it (say 5m) to rip it apart without simply converting all it’s matter into energy?
Physicist: Black holes are a little tricky. Rather than thinking of them as solid objects, it’s better to think of them as “messed up patches of geometry”. Destroying a black hole is just as difficult as destroying any patch of space. So, if by setting off a bomb you could change how rulers measure distance in a particular region of space, then you could affect a black hole.
Chucking anti-matter into a black hole would actually make it bigger. Anti-matter, as the named doesn’t imply, is made of the same “stuff” as ordinary matter. That is, if you were made of anti-matter, everything about you would be exactly the same (there are some subtleties with regard to neutrino emission, but who notices that?). The big thing that makes matter and anti-matter different is that bringing them together makes them cancel each other out, dumping all of their intrinsic energy (of the “E=MC2” variety) into a big boom.
Even if it did contact some matter inside, there’s no direction the explosion could go that doesn’t point toward the center. Beyond the event horizon all directions point down (and that’s messed up geometry).
Another way to look at it is; gravity is generated by both matter and energy, so converting a black hole’s matter into energy wouldn’t change much. You still have the same amount of matter/energy, and thus the same amount of gravity.
A spinning black hole can (in theory) produce a naked singularity, and maybe there’s something that can be done with that (most theories don’t have many definitive things to say about singularities), but probably not. Black holes are pretty tough.
What about evaporation? If a black hole evaporates via Hawking radiation, wouldn’t you consider it to be destroyed?
Totally!
But the question was besides Hawking radiation…
Sorry! Didn’t read the original question…
“most theories don’t have many definitive things to say about singularities”
Well, if theories did have definitive things to say about them, they wouldn’t be singularities! 🙂
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‘Even if it did contact some matter inside, there’s no direction the explosion could go that doesn’t point toward the center. Beyond the event horizon all directions point down.’
Is that figurative talk for ‘you can’t escape gravity’, or is there literally only this single direction? Not sure what to make of this or how to imagine it.
Non-figurative.
There are as many directions as outside, they just all go to the same place.
Isn’t that weird?
Some people (Hawking & others) seem to hold that if you can’t measure a thing, it does not exist (seductive though this is, I happen to disagree).
But if one were to suppose Hawking and Al were right in this, then:
Since, you cannot measure inside a black hole (you can measure round it, but not in it), the black hole already does not exist. It’s a hole in space, a sink.
Personally, I think the black hole idea is a naive attempt to extrapolate some simple mathematics into reality. It seems to be there because we do all the measurements using the same mathematics, perpetuating the same unseen error in the model.
So, since black holes don’t actually exist except as artifacts of instruments designed to ‘see’ black holes (illusion, phantasm, wishful thinking, delusion), one might quite easily destroy them by correctly re-imagining reality.
@Physiscist:
Yes, if one holds faith in the BigBang model, all directions from where we are now go to the single point at BigBang, which we ‘see’ as being approached in the far edges of the observable universe.
Since, in Euclidean space, straight lines that meet at infinity are parallel, all straight lines are in fact parallel (even though they don’t seem to be), and we already live in a parallel universe. 😎
This isn’t so bad, though, because straight lines are probably quite rare, except in the imagination of geometers.
It’s a bit more subtle. It’s more like “if there is no indication, direct or indirect, that something exists, then either it doesn’t exit or it doesn’t matter”.
While you can’t see beyond an event horizon, we can infer a fair amount. Similarly, until the 50’s no one had ever seen the far side of the moon. Until then we’d only inferred its existence, but you’d be hard pressed to find a scientist who didn’t think it did.
All of physics is a self-consciously naive attempt to extrapolate some simple mathematics into reality. But that math is based entirely on a careful study of reality. In this case; the math of general relativity. General relativity has already predicted (before any direct measurements were done) things like gravitational lensing, gravitational time dilation, black holes, frame dragging, and gravitational waves.
The first two have since been completely confirmed, there is a lot of evidence for the existence of black holes (for example; Sagittarius A*, a tiny, invisible object with a mass in excess of four million Suns), and the last two are in the works. Point is, it’s a very accurate, successful mathematical model, that has yielded a lot of predictive fruit already.
The “past the event horizon, all directions point to the center” thing is another prediction of general relativity. It’s due to the very non-Euclidean (non-Minkowskian even!) nature of spacetime around ultra-dense objects. The big bang is a whole other thing.
Is it than possible that the Big Bang was a collision between matter universe and anti-matter universe, since both of them are equally possible.
So all around infinitive space, a bubbles of universes are floating and bumping to each other.
If you launch a anti-matter black hole to a matter black hole (it will be a challenge to discover which type of it is), than it is possible that energy created from this collision is “stronger” than a gravity inside. Voila, a quasar start to exist!
It’s hard to say what’s going on outside of the universe.
However, we can talk about black holes. A black hole formed from anti-matter and a black hole formed from ordinary matter would be identical. If they collided, and if the material inside of them managed to come into contact, the explosion would be directed downward, and there would be no effect outside. A black hole just isn’t a “thing” that can be destroyed, it’s a patch of weird geometry. For the same reason that an explosion won’t change the distance between two points, an explosion can’t destroy a black hole.
what will happen if a black hole approaches the earth ?? What will the NASA do ??
If a black hole came anywhere near Earth we’d be thrown out of orbit, or at the very least thrown into a very different orbit. The orbit we’re in now is perfect for life and almost any other would mean the end of life.
I suppose the people at NASA would probably starting drinking or spending more time with their families.
I think that Dejan is asking, if a matter blackhole (who’s center, that gives it the tremendous gravity it has, is made of matter) collides with an anti-matter blackhole (who’s center, that gives it the tremendous gravity it has, is made of antimatter). Then wouldn’t they destroy each other (in the sense that they would destroy each others center, thus no longer having a mass to give them their unfathomable gravitational fields… Without the matter that grants them their gravity, they would no longer exist would they?)
To further add to my previous comment… If there is an antimatter particle for every matter particle, with their own anti-electrons, anti-protons, etc. Then wouldn’t an anti-blackhole have an anti-singularity? Then, just as antimatter annihilates matter from existence, wouldn’t an anti-singularity destroy a singularity from existence? With no singularity, there would be no black hole…
Or what if there was a white hole… Who spews out matter and particles just as a black hole consumes matter and particles. And then they were to meet? The black hole singularity would try to consume the white hole singularity and ultimately tie themselves into a “knot of nonexistence”…
“Anti-matter” is kinda unfortunately named. It isn’t the opposite of matter in all ways, it’s just a different kind of matter. In fact, if you were suddenly turned into anti-matter you’d have no way to tell the difference.
The total amount of energy, whether in the form of matter or anti-matter or just energy, in a black hole is all that’s important. As far as the black hole is concerned a kg of matter is the same as a kg of anti-matter.
If it’s possible for stuff to interact inside of a black hole, it doesn’t have any effects outside. The energy may change forms, but the total amount stays the same, and thus the total gravity and “black holeness” stays the same.
But isn’t it theoretically possible to have a anti-singularity? And if so, wouldn’t a anti-singularity and regular singularity cancel one another out of existence?
And what of the theoretical white hole?
It’s been many years since I’ve had a physics class dealing with anything more complex than kinematics, and perhaps these questions will only help show that…
Given that magnetism can provide a stronger force than gravity (as a kitchen magnet can overpower the gravity of our entire planet), then could a magnetic field theoretically be applied upon a black hole to destroy or distort it?
I’m unsure of a black hole’s magnetic properties and whether it’d even react to magnetic forces at all… or perhaps its own forces might (near-)infinitely overpower anything that could conceivably be wielded against it. So would a black hole even react to a magnetic field in any way at all, even if it doesn’t lead to any popularly-recognisable destruction or distortion?
And lastly: if the answer to either of those is “yes”, then a step down from the theoretical level to the practical level: much energy would be required and how might it be applied?
Magnetic and electric forces are definitely involved in the behavior of black holes!
But, in general, they’re only important if the black hole itself has a charge (which it gets by eating an imbalance of charge). The exact way that charged black hole behave is stunningly complicated.
That said, it’s not like black holes are completely incapable of being affected. For example, if stuff falls into them, they get bigger. A very large magnet would have some kind of noticeable effect on a black hole, but I couldn’t guess what that might be. It wouldn’t be able to “tear off pieces” however. A black hole isn’t “an object” in any real sense.
So while it is possible for a black hole to grow ‘bigger’ with the ingestion of more matter, it’s impossible for a black hole to ‘fall apart’ or tear apart into smaller black holes?
This is making my head spin.
I understand the part about how antimatter is mass, but I don’t get how antimatter would just make a black hole bigger. If an equal amount of matter and antimatter collide, they are turned into energy. So, if one was to turn the mass of a black hole into energy, wouldn’t the gravity be lessened, and the geometry of that region be changed?
Love Long and Prosper
You’d think so!
But energy causes gravity just as much as mass. In fact (were so inclined), you could say that energy is what causes gravity and that mass only causes gravity because of its equivalent energy content.
Wouldnt it take infinite time to approach an event horizont, because the light cant escape the black hole? And we know that the time slows down, while we travel closer to the speed of light.
Is it possible to fill a black hole with enough matter, that it will stop spinning, and lead to its own death?
I don’t quite think so. If the addition of antimatter makes the hole bigger, and thus stronger, then it doesen’t seem like anything other than Hawking Radiation COULD destroy it. It may in fact be the one thing closest to ‘invincible’ this Universe will ever see…
Couldn’t a reverse magnetic wind began to slowly pull apart the black holes outer rings slowly disintegrating it and strewing the access energy inside of it to the vacuum if space. Even though space can never truly demagnetize a magnet or weaken its powers the magnetic energy would have a LARGE area to exert itself eventually creating another black hole as it consumed and attracted other large pieces of energy.
To Physicist:
If negative matter exists, then what happens if you throw a black hole made of negative matter into a regular black hole?
I think you’re all missing the point. Inside of a black hole matter, as we know it, doesn’t exist. The gravitational forces inside of a black hole rip matter apart into it’s constituent sub-atomic particles. So the protons and electrons in an atom are ripped apart into quarks, leptons, etc. The same thing would happen with anti-matter. It would get ripped apart before it could interact with matter (probably).
Plus, lets say that anti-matter and matter do collide. The resulting explosion releases a massive amount of energy. All energy has a maximum speed of the speed of light, and cannot travel any faster. Since light cannot escape a black hole’s event horizon, energy cannot either, which means that all that energy gets sucked down into the black hole.
So if you smash together a black hole and an anti-matter black hole (which is pretty much impossible since matter and anti-matter can’t exist inside of a black hole) you would just get a black hole of twice the size. Maybe inside of the black hole there would be a conversion of matter into energy, but the energy has nowhere to go. It can’t escape the event horizon, so it stays inside the black hole, leading to no net loss in size.
@Knowan
I’m talking about negative matter, not antimatter. They have very different theoretical meanings. Check out the link in my above comment and you’ll see what I mean.
Try hitting it with a zero point energy field, and don’t go near it. Send a ship with only droids to do the actual work.
if a black hole compresses all its matter to a single point does that mean a black hole could store an infinite mass? if no light can escape from it does this mean that gravity can somewhat travel faster than light? how is it possible for it to punch a hole in space, does that mean the energy in a black hole goes nowhere does that mean a black hole doesn’t exist but it does exist so is it in a superposition of states. Is a black hole something and nothing at the same time?
If you were to deploy a sufficent amount of antimatter quickly enough, from all directions, into the black hole… doesn’t it stand to reason that the explosion of energy upon impact would lower the density of the core? Wouldn’t lowering the density of the core possibly reduce the radius of the event horizon?
If yes, then possibly you could lower the density quickly enough to bring the event horizon closer to the surface of the hole, allowing some mass/energy to bleed out.
I believe that our universe is one of many all connected to each other by these black\white holes when the found evidence of a white hole in 2005 the reason it didn’t appear to be caused by a supernova was because the supernova occurred in the opposing universe and made a black hole blowing time space and matter into our universe as white hole that is why they seemingly come out of “nowhere”. I believe that our universe was created in this way much like blowing bubbles several white holes from other universes started blowing out space\time\matter into void space until they came together to make ours now i just need to know what else is in void space in order to find out what is supplying the matter to the main universe
I am not a physicist and hated physics at school. So I don’t know much about black holes and matter/ anti-matter, so my question may seem a little silly. I am just curious.
What if you just removed space from around a black hole? Matter cannot travel faster than light but space can, yes? So if you could remove (stretch) the space from around a black hole at all points ( similar to clearing the forest around a forest fire ) ,which I know would require unbelievable amounts of energy, until all the space around the centre of the black hole was gone leaving it cut it off from the rest of space? In theroy, would this mean that it was unable to consume any more matter and would simple remain there lifeless?
What would happen if you were to only feed a black hole particles that have more electrical charge than mass until the black hole had a greater electrical charge than mass?
Wouldn’t (in theory) black holes be pure gravity pulling everything into a single atom? If yes, then wouldn’t it be possible to fill it up? (i know it would take millions upon millions of years due to the size of atoms, but i still think it may be possible)
Sorry, by fill it up, I meant with electrons, protons, and neutrons. And I am also puzzled because I don’t know if subatomic particles are destroyed when taken away from atoms.
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if antimatter is induced into black hole then there would certainly happen a big bang as positive gravitons and negative gravitons of antimatter are clashing making matter
What if I send a huge amount of electrons into black hole? After enough electrons sent, each electron inside black hole will be repulsed outwards more than it is drawn inwards by the gravity. And so electrons will start moving outwards. Then much of the black hole mass will be concentrated far from its center, and so the density of the black hole will be less than critical and it will be not a black hole any more. Am I right?
Another question: say we have a neutron star. We add to it neutrons one by one until it becomes a black hole. So we have a black hole which is one neutron apart from a non-blackhole neutron star. Then why this black hole should be different from neutron star? It will also consist of neutrons. The only difference is that nothing can escape it, but inside it is absolutely identical to neutron star. So what is so special in it? Why in neutrons star lacking one neutron till black hole information does not disappear and if you add one neutron, everything drastically changes?
I’m not really sure that black holes exist. We talk about singularities, but isn’t that just where mathematically, the lim –> infinity? Isn’t it really just a mathematical model rather than a real thing?
Ok, put that aside after maybe a comment 😉
If we take the big bang as fact(ie all the stuff of the universe is in there like Ragu), then wouldn’t that have been by definition a black hole– a point or accumulation of mass so large that everything was in it? If everything was in it, then nothing could escape even light. But then a “bang” happened and somehow everything escaped….. Does this mean that a black hole can become so massive that it will cease to be a black hole and start ejecting material?
Oh this is fun. I want to get paid to think up stuff. 🙂
What if our Universe is simply a huge black hole? It would totally make sense. The Big Bang could simply be a collision between an anti-matter black hole and a “normal-matter” black hole. The expansion of the universe and the constantly growing total mass could simply be the black hole eating other stuff in a parallel Universe. Thus, we are stuck in this Universe because there’s no way to escape the singularity where we are all living. At a certain point, when a black hole becomes big enough, its interior forces can be low enough to avoid the matter to rip all apart.
No any body or particle with some initial speed (even speed if light) can escape black hole. How about a body that uses propulsion? A rocket moving away from Earth with constant speed of just 10 m/sec will eventually reach Moon orbit. Can this approach be uses to escape black hole (assuming we have a string enough rocket that is not destroyed by black hole gravity and enough fuel – maybe we are an antimatter rocket which uses annihilation)?
The only way that I know of to fight a black hole is to starve it and wait. ok, you may have to wait a very long time depending on the size of the black hole, but I guess that if you could accelerate it up to close to the speed of causation (light speed) then you probably could get it to evaporate much faster, at least it would evaporate faster from your perspective.
What if you somehow* sent a meteor flying towards a black hole so quickly that the black hole’s gravitational forces didn’t have enough time to rip apart the meteor, and the meteor and the black hole collided at such a speed that, instead of being absorbed, the meteor actually shattered the black hole? Would that be possible? Would such a speed have to be faster than light?
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if you put enough matter in a black hole will it blow up?
There is no known or apparent limit to the size of a black hole, in that sense. It appears that they can increase in mass indefinitely without such a risk.
Though there *does* appear to be some limitation on how big a black hole can get. As black holes get larger and larger, the matter in their accretion disks is believed to become clumpier, forming into stars. These clumps/stars are not as susceptible to the inward pull of a black hole, and as a black hole reaches an estimated ~50 billion solar masses in size: its supply of matter is found to clump so much that it effectively cuts off the black hole’s food supply, stunting its growth.
https://academic.oup.com/mnrasl/article/456/1/L109/2589770
Granted, the largest black hole identified (TON 618) appears to measure about 66 billion suns, so that 50 billion limit isn’t a hard and unbeatable value (though TON 618 is the only known black hole above 50 bil).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_massive_black_holes