Black Holes

Introduction

The goal of this talk is to motivate the existence of black holes from a physics perspective: Im not going to derive their existence or their properties, but Ill show you the types of tools physicists use to describe black holes mathematically and how they derive these properties. The punchline is that black holes are massive objects where all of their mass is concentrated at a single point in space: this point is what you often here called a singularity. Theyre so massive, in fact, that they curve space and time themselves! Everything cool youve heard about black holes can be derived from understanding how black holes curve spacetime, so Ill try to motivate how/why this happens. This will be our roadmap:

1. Understand the dierence between at space and curved space. 2. Understand how to characterize the curvature of space. Physicists use whats called a metric to describe the kind of space theyre talking about and to gure out what paths objects in that space will take from one point to another, so well talk a bit about metrics. 3. Understand how measurements of time and space depend on your point of view. This is important, since the way we see black holes and how things fall into a black hole is very dierent from what an object falling into a black hole actually experiences. 4. Well put time and space on the same footing, and learn how to draw spacetime diagrams! Spacetime can be at or curved, just like regular space can be at or curved. 5. Well motivate Einsteins great discovery that the distribution of matter actually determines what the spacetime is: Matter tells spacetime how to curve. 6. Finally, we will use this fact to motivate the existence of black holes, and then talk about some black hole facts / misconceptions. 1

What does at space mean? How is it dierent from curved space?

1. Flat means that pythagorus theorem holds. The distance between points in 2-d at space is (draw picture) s 2 = x2 + y 2 2. Flat space also means that triangles have angles that add up to 180 . (draw picture) 3. The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. (Note: the shortest distance between two points is called a geodesic.

Note that this is dierent from curved space! (Get ball, put cloth on ball, draw triangle, atten out. Show Pythagorus theorem doesnt hold. Geodesics are curved lines).

What is a metric?
How does a physicist describe whether a space is at or not? With a metric! A metric is just a way of writing down whatever kind of space you want to talk about in some given coordinate system. It tells you how to get from one point to another in that space: how to take distance intervals in a space. Lets write the at space metric. You are all familiar with the cartesian coordinate system, where we put x on the x-axis and y on the y-axis. This is a two-dimensional coordinate system, because were talking about two variables. In this coordinate system, we all know how to nd a distance: (draw pythagorean theorem). The metric tells you how to nd very small distances. To denote that were talking about small distances, lets put a little d in front of each of our variablesthis is a common convention. and voila! Our at space metric in 2-d cartesian coordinates is: ds2 = dx2 + dy 2 As advertised, it tells you how to take little distances in your space. Why is this so useful? 1. To get big distances, you just add up lots of little distances. 2. Flat space vs. curved space metrics are dierent! A at space metric can not be made to look like a curved space metric just from a change of coordinates. 3. Given a metric, you can derive the geodesics of your space. Since metrics give you lengths, basically you minimize the metric and derive what the shortest distance between two points is in your space. Of course, if we were to do this for our at space metric, you would derive the equation for a straight line.

 Let me emphasize: there are dierent ways of writing at space. Physical idea: physics doesnt depend on how you choose your coordinates (physics doesnt depend on the physicist). It turns out that its easiest to write the black hole metric in polar coordinates, so I am going to write our at space metric in polar coordinates: (draw polar coordinates) ds2 = dr2 + r2 d2

Space and time should not be treated separately (in relativity)

Basic idea of special relativity: the way you measure both space (distances) and time depends on your frame of reference. But the laws of physics should be the same in any (non-accelerating) frame of reference. The basic idea that your frame of reference matters should make sense classically (in your everyday life). Example 1: Consider the Doppler eect. When an ambulance passes by you, you rst hear the siren at a high pitch, and this becomes a lower and lower pitch as it passes and moves away from you in the opposite direction. Why is this? Well, the pitch of sound that you hear depends on the frequency of the sound wave. The frequency of a sound wave is how often the particles of the air (through which the sound wave is propagating) vibrate as the sound waves moves through the air. In physics, anytime the speed of the source of a wave (the ambulance) and the speed of the observer of the wave (you!) have a relative velocity, the frequency that you observe is going to be dierent from the frequency that the source observes by some factor that depends on the relative velocity. As the ambulance moves towards and away from you (though not straight towards you), the relative velocity between you and the ambulance changes..in particular changing sign as it passes you.. thus resulting in the changing pitch you hear. Example 2. You throw one ball every second at the same constant velocity in the direction of your friend (thus, you are throwing the balls at a constant frequency). If your friend stands still, they receive one ball every second..thus they observe the same frequency as you observe. But if you start running towards your friend, your friend will receive the balls more frequently since theyll be less spaced out: youre still throwing them once a second, but now the balls thrown later have less distance to travel before they get to your friend because youve moved closer to them before throwing the ball. Thus, your friend will observe a dierent frequency than you observe in your frame of reference! The theory of special relativity is like this, but cooler! In relativity, the length you measure an object to be depends on your relative velocity to the object, and the time lapse between two events depends on the relative speeds of the observers reference frames.

 One example: the faster a clock moves, the faster it keeps the same time. The idea is the kind of the same idea as the ball throwing example, except imagine the frequency thats changing is the frequency of your heart beats. When youre moving really fast, in your frame your heart is beating at the same frequency its been beating at, but in someone elses frame (where the relative velocity between you and the other person is very large), the frequency is dierent. This means that if you have a friend thats your age, and you send them o in a rocket ship moving very very quickly away from earth (so the relative velocity between you and your friend is very large), your friend will actually age (Disclaimer:) Relativistic eects are only seen at very very high speeds: specically, speeds close to the speed of light.

Spacetime! and spacetime diagrams!

So: hopefully you believe me when I say that in the theory of relativity, the observed rate at which time passes for an object depends on the objects velocity relative to the observer. This immediately implies that we cant treat space and time separately (for our purposes)! We should really think of time and space as on the same footing: we should think about ourselves as living in spacetime. In particular, this means we should think of everything that happens as an event in spacetime. We can assign everything spacetime coordinates: your spatial position relative to some coordinate origin, and your position in time relative to some choice of time origin. (Draw spacetime diagrams, and demonstrate the idea of coordinates on a spacetime diagram). the trajectory of an object is a curve in spacetime. We call this curve a world line. (Draw curves on spacetime diagrams as an example. Demonstrate the ideas of past and future). Now that all our coordinates are both space and time coordinates, this means we should add a time component to our metric! Recall the at space metric, ds2 = dx2 + dy 2 , which tells us how to measure spatial distances between points. Well, now were interested in measuring distances between points in spacetime! In the theory of relativity, it turns out there is only one way to consistently add time to our at space metric, and that is like this : ds2 = dt2 + dx2 + dy 2 . Just like we call regular at space Euclidean space, this extra-dimensional space has a name: its called Minkowski space.

Where gravity comes in

Remember: we can derive the paths that objects take in spacetime (like geodesics) based on the spacetime metric. This says that spacetime tells matter how to move. But we need to go a step further to talk about black holes. Einstein discovered that when an object is big enough, the gravitational elds from the objects are so strong that they bend spacetime! Review: gravity aects all objects with mass. I am gravitationally attracted to each of you, but our masses are so small that the eects of this attraction are completely negligible. We are gravitationally attracted to the earth, and because the earth is so big that gravitational force is what holds us here to its surface! The earth is gravitationally attracted to the sun, and thats what keeps us in orbit around the sun. One of Einsteins great discoveries is that when an object is big enough, the gravitational eld emanating from that object is so strong that it bends spacetime itself! Einsteins fundamental theory of general relativity says: 1. Spacetime tells matter how to move. This should make sense to us from our previous discussion: we characterize spacetime by a metric, and can use the metric to derive paths that objects take in that spacetime. We talked about how the metric tells us geodesics (shortest distance paths), and given a bit more information it can tell us about general paths too. 2. Matter tells spacetime how to curve. You can actually start with some given mass distribution, and derive what the metric of that space is! (recall: metric tells you what shape your spacetime is). This important result is summarized in Einsteins equations. They look like (stu involving the metric that tells you the spacetime curvature) = (stu involving the energy of your matter in that space).

The black hole solution to Einsteins equations

Finally, we can answer the question: what is a black hole? Formally, the spacetime of a black hole is a special case of the solution to Einsteins equations for a spherically symmetric mass distribution. It is what the spacetime of a spherically symmetric mass distribution looks like when enough mass is in a small enough radius. Since we now have some understanding of metrics, this is the black hole metric (again, as derived by Einsteins equations): ds2 = 1 1 rs dt2 + dr2 + r2 d2 . rs r 1 r

It is called the Schwarzschild metric, and you can clearly see that it is not the at space metric! In fact, this is the metric that describes any spherically symmetric 5

mass distribution: this is the metric that describes the spacetime around the sun, for example. And this is the metric that describes a black hole, which forms when all the mass of the spherically symmetric object lies in a small enough radius. Before I talk about all the properties of black holes, we can stare at our black hole metric a little bit and see exactly where things are going to get interesting. 1. Observation 1: our metric blows up at r = rs . It turns out that this isnt a real blow up, since it goes away with some clever changes of coordinates, but r = rs is still an interesting place: its called the event horizon of a black hole. 2. Observation 2: our metric blows up at r = 0. This is a real blow up, that never goes away no matter how many changes of coordinates you make.

Features of black holes

Every cool thing youve ever heard about black holes can be derived from the black hole metric. Now, Ill talk about some of those features. As previously stated, a black hole forms when all the mass of an object is squished into a small enough radius: specically, inside its Schwarzschild radius. (Note: the Schwarzschild radius depends on the mass of the object..dierent masses = dierent Schwarzschild radii). When this happens, the mass all collapses in on itself: you can think of all the mass being squished into a tiny radius at r = 0. This might happen, for example, when a dying star becomes unstable, and its internal pressure is insucient to resist its own gravity; then the star collapses in on itself. If it collapses into a small enough radius, its Schwarzschild radius, it wont be able to stop, and will form a black hole. The singularity at r = 0 is the generic feature of the black hole solution. It is why you sometimes here black holes referred to as singularitiesblack holes cause the metric of spacetime itself to become innite! Theyre a place where the curvature of spacetime becomes innite. This makes sense, since you have so much mass all concentrated at one point in space. Outside the Schwarzschild radius, this spacetime is the spacetime of objects around the sun: theres nothing special about it. Black holes are often found at the center of galaxies for precisely this reason: they have a huge gravitational eld since theyre very massive, and so astronomical objects will orbit them just like the Earth rotates around the sun. You can actually derive what the stable orbits around a black hole are just by studying the metric. From the metric you can get the potential energy of a particle in the Schwarzschild spacetime, and from the potential energy you can show what the stable orbits are. The Schwarzschild radius is called the event horizon. Absolutely nothing can escape beyond the event horizon, not even light: it is the point of no return. 6

Matter and light can pass inwards at the event horizon, but nothing can leave. Basically, this is because the curvature of spacetime is so big inside the event horizon (remember: matter deforms spacetime itself!) that there are no paths that lead away from the black hole. Remember we talked about how relativistic eects can change how we measure time. To a distant observer of a black hole, clocks nearing a black hole appear to click more and more slowly, until time literally stops. An observer far from the black hole will never actually see an object fall into a black hole: they will see the object slow down more and more until it actually seems to stand still. But how do we see objects? by the light the objects emit back to us. The frequency of this light becomes so distorted, that while we see the object slowing down we also see it getting redder and dimmer, until it becomes so dim we cant actually see it at all. You will never see an object actually fall into a black hole, you will just see it appear to stretch out and fade away at the event horizon. On the other hand, the object itself will feel totally normal! The object falling into the black hole, according to his own clock, just crosses the event horizon in a nite time. But eventually the gravitational forces on the object will rip the object apart.