this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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Astronomy
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Supposedly.
They can still rotate, so that means they're not just unidimensional points in space.
Technically couldn't a ray emanating from a singularity rotate? Like, the point could have a sort of orientation without having any real measure?
Not saying that's the case here, but I think it could happen.
Let me stop you right there: a ray can't emanate from a black hole, that's why it's a black hole, not even zero-mass light-speed photons can get out.
We know about black holes rotating, because we can detect frame dragging around them, which means whatever mass is in there, has an average rotation.
The thing is, an absolute "singularity" doesn't even make sense for a black hole. From what we know of how they get formed, they're just a bunch of star that gets compressed so tight that its own gravity doesn't let anything escape... but that doesn't mean every particle goes straight to the center of mass. Forming a singularity would require the initial star core to be kind of perfectly symmetrical, at absolute rest and 0K, which definitely is not the case. What's more likely, is that at the center of a black hole, there is a star worth of particles "orbiting" the center of mass at speeds close to the speed of light, sometimes bumping into each other, but since not even mass-less photons can escape the black hole, nothing can get bumped out like it would in normal stars, atmospheres, and so on.
From a mathematical point of view it makes sense to say there is a "singularity", since for most purposes it behaves like one... but it really isn't one. It's also easier to think of the event horizon to be "empty" inside... but it also really is not, it's going to be full of recently trapped particles on decaying orbits, with a lot of them being still right on the other side of the event horizon (more particles will be entering at a shallower than a steeper angle).
Also, being an actual singularity would make evaporation due to Hawking radiation kind of impossible.
When I said "ray" I just meant an imaginary line that could be drawn to extend in a given direction, not a literal particle escaping. It was mostly to think of a way you might conceptualize an orientation of an object that may not have any dimension. As in, if the matter just outside a singularity rotates, perhaps you could consider it to rotate? But I'm not sure that would be accurate to say anyway. My grasp of the physics of black holes is obviously pretty loose. :)
Thanks for taking the time to explain!
The thing is, if it had no dimension, then there would be no way for it to have any orientation in some dimensions, it would have to be perfectly identical regarding all dimensions.
It's a bit more fun, because it would be normal for matter to orbit around before falling in, but "frame dragging" means that not just matter, but also light outside it rotates with the black hole, and time gets stretched.