I was wondering in the shower today if when a star collapses into a black hole, if individual particles are "crushed" under the pressure from gravity and collapse into a singularity, and if many different particles will experience this simultaneously, would this process result in multiple singularities inside the event horizon of the black hole? Also, if an individual particle started falling toward a singularity, it would presumably cross the threshold for pressure (after which point it would itself collapse into a singularity) before it contacted the singularity.
It occurred to me that two (or more) orbiting singularities would never meet (this assumes that space-time is continuous), and so if the process of creating a black hole ended up resulting in multiple singularities inside the event horizon, these singularities would never merge. Presumably they would eventually end up in very tight orbits inside the event horizon, but even in this case, it would presumably mean that the event horizon itself wouldn’t be completely spherical, (or elliptical), and that you may be able to measure this difference.
Anonymous says:
No
January 21, 2012 — 3:11 am
David Wees says:
That doesn’t help me… no explanation of why not?
January 21, 2012 — 1:51 pm
Oscar says:
Say you fall into a black hole and I am watching here from Earth, I’ll see some stuff fall into the black hole, then I will see you fall in, and then I’ll see other stuff fall in.
So you dip into the event horizon, some of whatever fell in before you did will scatter back up due to the warping of space and time. This layer gets compressed to a thin sheet due to the extreme slowing of time inside the black hole, here the tidal forces will grow infinitely strong, so this is essentially a singularity moving towards the outside.
If you were to look up, you would see everything that fell in after you form into a thin sheet falling at the speed of light, the tidal forces here will also grow infinately strong, a singularity falling in after you.
So essentially you are sandwiched between these two singularities after crossing the event horizon.
November 25, 2014 — 3:13 pm