Research Paper

Article by – Tanisha Aggarwal

Title – Explaining Black Holes

Author – Stephen Hawking
Abstract -
We review here some of the major open issues and challenges in black hole
physics today, and the current progress on the same. It is pointed out that to
secure a concrete foundation for the basic theory as well as astrophysical
applications for black hole physics, it is essential to gain a suitable insight into
these questions. In particular, we discuss the recent results investigating the
final fate of a massive star within the framework of the Einstein gravity, and
the stability and genericity aspects of the gravitational collapse outcomes in
terms of black holes and naked singularities. Recent developments such as
spinning up a black hole by throwing matter into it, and physical effects near
naked singularities are considered. It is pointed out that some of the new
results obtained in recent years in the theory of gravitational collapse imply
interesting possibilities and understanding for the theoretical advances in
gravity as well as towards new astrophysical applications.

Keywords -
1. Inhomogeneities - the condition or an instance of not being
homogeneous
2. Super translations - A translation of a superalgebra.
Introduction
Modern astrophysics considers three types of black holes in the Universe: a)
Black holes of stellar masses, which were born when massive stars died, b)
Supermassive black holes with masses up to 10^M and more {MQ = 2 X log^^g
is mass of the Sun) at centres of galaxies, c) Primordial black holes which might
appear from the large-scale inhomogeneities at the very beginning of
expansion of the Universe. Their masses can be arbitrary, but primordial black
holes with M < log will have radiated away their mass by the Hawking quantum
process in a time t < 10 years (the age of the Universe). Only primordial black
holes with mass M > log could exist in the contemporary Universe.
"When all the thermo-nuclear sources of energy are exhausted a sufficiently
heavy star will collapse" - this is the first phrase of the abstract of a wonderful
paper by Oppenheimer and Snyder (1939). Every statement of this paper
accords with ideas that remain popular today (including terminology). The
authors conclude in the abstract: "... an external observer sees the star
shrinking to its gravitational radius." This was the modern prediction of the
formation of the black holes when massive stars die. How heavy should a star
be to turn into a black hole? The answer is not simple. A star light enough ends
up as a white dwarf or a neutron star. Both these types of celestial bodies have
the upper limits of their masses. For white dwarfs it is the Chandrasekhar limit
which is about 1.2-1.4 MQ [see Shapiro and Tarkovsky 1983, Kippenhahn and
Wiegert 1990]. For neutron stars it is the Oppenheimer-Volk off limit
[Oppenheimer and Volk off 1939]. The exact value of this limit depends on the
equation of state at matter density larger than the density of nuclear matter
po = 2.8 x log^'^g cm. The modern theory gives for this maximum mass Mmax,
ov ~ (2 — 3) M0 [see Balm and Patrick 1979, Lamb 1991]. Some authors
discussed the possibility of existence of so called "quark stars" and "hadronic
stars" [see Alcook, Farhi and Olinto 1986, Bahcall, Lynn, and Selipsky 1990,
Madsen 1993]. At present, there is no evidence for such stars.
Review of Literature
Black holes are, appropriately, a bête noire of modern physics: gravitationally
ravenous ghosts of collapsed stars that supposedly swallow everything in their
immediate environs, even light. These cosmic objects with infinitely small and
dense cores (called singularities) are brought to life in this year’s BBC radio
Reith Lectures by Stephen Hawking, a scientist whose own existence appears
similarly to defy the odds. Professor Hawking may have soared from humble
scientist to wheelchair-bound cultural icon — both his brilliance and his battle
with motor neurone disease are depicted in the film The Theory of Everything,
in which he is played by an Oscar-winning Eddie Redmayne — but the 74-year-
old is still most well known in scientific circles for his pioneering theoretical
research into black holes, a term coined by US physicist John Wheeler. Their
existence — one lurks at the centre of our own galaxy — is inferred from their
gravitational effects on nearby objects; the boundary of a black hole is known
as an event horizon. Prof Hawking, based at the University of Cambridge,
describes traversing this boundary as “a bit like going over Niagara Falls in a
canoe.  once you are over the edge you are lost, there is no way back.” The
gravitational pull on your body, he says, would probably turn you into human
spaghetti, a long thin string of particles pulled inexorably into the core. Before
you enter the black hole, you constitute what cold-hearted physicists would
call “information” — your every particle has a defined position and speed. But
as you become squeezed and stretched and crushed to an infinitesimally small
point, that information is lost. In the 1970s, Prof Hawking, along with Jacob
Birkenstein, realised that, contrary to received wisdom, matter swallowed up
could be spat out later as the black hole decayed — as “Hawking radiation”.
But this spawned a problem: the “information paradox”. Put simply, the
Hawking radiation leaking out did not allow an observer to deduce anything
about the particles that originally fell in. This idea that information vanishes
inside a black hole made cosmologists unhappy; the preservation of
information is sacrosanct because it underpins the predictability of the
universe: “If. . the predictability of the universe breaks down at black holes it
could break down in other situations. Even worse, if determinism breaks down,
we can’t be sure of our past history either. The history books and our
memories could just be illusions.” Prof Hawking recently suggested a solution:
that information is imprinted on the event horizon before matter falls into the
black hole. This allows it to be seen by observers both inside and outside the
black hole, providing an element of preservation between the two realms. The
mathematics behind “super translations”, as he calls these imprints, is
undergoing intense scrutiny. His two lectures show how much cosmology
overlaps with philosophy and make an excellent addition to the Reith canon,
which since 1948 has encouraged leading thinkers to enrich the public
discourse. Prof Hawking additionally triumphs over the limitations of his voice
synthesiser to show how even the most difficult life can be lived with
optimism, ambition and humour: “If you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give
up. There’s a way out.”

Problem Statement/Research Gap

While general relativity may predict the existence of both black holes and
naked singularities as collapse outcome, an important question then is, how
would a realistic continual gravitational collapse of a massive star in nature
would end up. Thus, the key issue under active debate now is the following:
Even if naked singularities did develop as collapse end states, would they be
generic or stable in some suitably well-defined sense, as permitted by the
gravitation theory? The point here is, if naked singularity formation in collapse
was necessarily ‘non-generic’ in some appropriately well-defined sense, then
for all practical purposes, a realistic physical collapse in nature might always
end up in a black hole, whenever a massive star ended its life. In fact, such a
genericity requirement has been always discussed and desired for any possible
mathematical formulation for CCC right from its inception. However, the main
difficulty here has again been that, there is no well-defined or precise notion of
genericity available in gravitation theory and the general theory of relativity.
Again, it is only various gravitational collapse studies that can provide us with
more insight into this genericity aspect also.
Objectives of the study
1. I guess it is true that there is unlikely to be any event in the near future
endangering human life that involves Black Holes. However, if that were
the criteria upon which we based what we should study there would be
no computers for me to tell you this! There are many things which
benefit humankind, and I believe strongly that one of them is the search
for knowledge. I think most people would agree that art for art's sake
benefits humankind, so why not science for science's sake!

2. Black Holes may also be fundamental to properly understanding gravity

which is very useful. In fact, it is necessary to include corrections from
General Relativity (which has been much better understood through the
study of Black Holes) to the Global Positioning Satellites in order to make
them accurate to more than a few metres. This may ultimately help
blind people have a better standard of living and I believe has already
been used to rescue lost people.

3. There is ample indirect evidence from various astronomical studies

indicating that black holes exist, including the investigation of nearby
objects that are subjected to the gravitational pull of a black hole. These
are circumstances well explained by the General Theory of Relativity
(GR). It was the direct observation of the immediate environment
surrounding a black hole—the event horizon—that had never been
achieved, until now. With the release of the first results in April 2019,
the EHT has filled a significant gap in our empirical knowledge.

4. Black holes are laboratories for testing fundamental theories that

explain how the Universe works on the largest and the smallest scales
(e.g., GR and Quantum Physics). While each of these theories works well
in its respective regime, physicists currently do not understand how to
create a single physical theory that would be universal and, hence,
explain the physics of black holes in detail. With the EHT results,
scientists are able to directly resolve the conditions of spacetime at the
black hole boundary.

5. In addition to the fundamental physical theories, there are many details

of plasma physics that are not completely understood. Properties of the
 hot gas surrounding and being pulled into the black hole beyond the
event horizon are not fully known. But, understanding these properties
is crucial for interpreting black hole images because it is this glowing
plasma that produces radiation captured radio telescope arrays.
Effectively, this glowing hot gas illuminates the shape of spacetime
around the black hole and EHT observations will help to better
understand the properties and behaviour of these extreme
environments.

Research Questions

1. If Black Holes Are “Black,” How Do Scientists Know They Are

There?

A black hole cannot be seen because of the strong gravity that is pulling all of
the light into the black hole’s centre. However, scientists can see the effects of
its strong gravity on the stars and gases around it. If a star is orbiting a certain
point in space, scientists can study the star’s motion to find out if it is orbiting a
Research Papers on Black Holes.
In reality, Albert Einstein initially anticipated the presence of black holes in
1916, with his general theory of relativity. The expression “black hole” was
begat numerous years after the fact in 1967 by American astronomer John
Wheeler. Following quite a while of dark openings being referred to just as
hypothetical items, the principal physical dark gap at any point found was seen
in 1971.
Moreover, the first mark of a black hole is “gravitationally collapsed star”
which depends on Newtonian Physics where we depict Gravity, as a force like
the one we experience on earth in PhD Research Project

2. Could a Research Papers on Black Holes Destroy Earth?

As a matter of fact, Black holes do not wander around the universe, randomly
swallowing worlds. They follow the laws of gravity just like other objects in
space. The orbit of a black hole would have to be very close to the solar system
to affect Earth, which is not likely.
Important to realize, if a black hole coupled with the same mass as the sun
were to replace the sun, Earth would not fall in. The black hole with the same
mass as the sun would keep the same gravity as the sun. On the positive side,
the planets would still orbit the black hole as they orbit the sun now.
So far, astronomers have identified three types of black holes: stellar black
holes, super massive black holes and intermediate black holes.

Research Methodology
1. Hidden delays

The Event Horizon Telescope uses a technique called interferometry, which

combines the signals detected by pairs of telescopes, so that the signals
interfere with each other. Indeed, CHIRP could be applied to any imaging
system that uses radio interferometry. Usually, an astronomical signal will
reach any two telescopes at slightly different times. Accounting for that
difference is essential to extracting visual information from the signal, but the
Earth’s atmosphere can also slow radio waves down, exaggerating differences
in arrival time and throwing off the calculation on which interferometric
imaging depends. Bauman adopted a clever algebraic solution to this problem:
If the measurements from three telescopes are multiplied, the extra delays
caused by atmospheric noise cancel each other out. This does mean that each
new measurement requires data from three telescopes, not just two, but the
increase in precision makes up for the loss of information.

2. Preserving continuity

Even with atmospheric noise filtered out, the measurements from just a
handful of telescopes scattered around the globe are pretty sparse; any
number of possible images could fit the data equally well. So, the next step is
to assemble an image that both fits the data and meets certain expectations
about what images look like. Bauman and her colleagues made contributions
on that front, too. The algorithm traditionally used to make sense of
astronomical interferometric data assumes that an image is a collection of
individual points of light, and it tries to find those points whose brightness and
location best correspond to the data. Then the algorithm blurs together bright
points near each other, to try to restore some continuity to the astronomical
image. To produce a more reliable image, CHIRP uses a model that’s slightly
more complex than individual points but is still mathematically tractable. You
could think of the model as a rubber sheet covered with regularly spaced
cones whose heights vary but whose bases all have the same diameter. Fitting
the model to the interferometric data is a matter of adjusting the heights of
the cones, which could be zero for long stretches, corresponding to a flat
sheet. Translating the model into a visual image is like draping plastic wrap
over it: The plastic will be pulled tight between nearby peaks, but it will slope
down the sides of the cones adjacent to flat regions. The altitude of the plastic
wrap corresponds to the brightness of the image. Because that altitude varies
continuously, the model preserves the natural continuity of the image. Of
course, Bauman’s cones are a mathematical abstraction, and the plastic wrap
is a virtual “envelope” whose altitude is determined computationally. And, in
fact, mathematical objects called splines, which curve smoothly, like parabolas,
turned out to work better than cones in most cases. But the basic idea is the
same.

3. Prior knowledge

Finally, Bauman used a machine-learning algorithm to identify visual patterns

that tend to recur in 64-pixel patches of real-world images, and she used those
features to further refine her algorithm’s image reconstructions. In separate
experiments, she extracted patches from astronomical images and from
snapshots of terrestrial scenes, but the choice of training data had little effect
on the final reconstructions. Bauman prepared a large database of synthetic
astronomical images and the measurements they would yield at different
telescopes, given random fluctuations in atmospheric noise, thermal noise
from the telescopes themselves, and other types of noise. Her algorithm was
frequently better than its predecessors at reconstructing the original image
from the measurements and tended to handle noise better. She’s also made
her test data publicly available online for other researchers to use. With the
Event Horizon Telescope project, “there is a large gap between the needed
high recovery quality and the little data available,” says Yoav Schechter, a
professor of electrical engineering at Israel’s Technion, who was not involved
in the work. “This research aims to overcome this gap in several ways: careful
modelling of the sensing process, cutting-edge derivation of a prior-image
model, and a tool to help future researchers test new methods.” “Suppose you
want a high-resolution video of a baseball,” Schechter explains. “The nature of
ballistic trajectory is prior knowledge about a ball's trajectory. In essence, the
prior knowledge constrains the sought unknowns. Hence, the exact state of the
ball in space-time can be well determined using sparsely captured data.” “The
authors of this paper use a highly advanced approach to learn prior
knowledge,” he continues. “The application of this prior-model approach to
event-horizon images is not trivial. The authors took on major effort and risk.
They mathematically merge into a single optimization formulation a very
different, complex sensing process and a learning-based image-prior model.”

Analysis and Findings

The idea of an object in space so massive and dense that light could not escape
it has been around for centuries. Most famously, black holes were predicted by
Einstein's theory of general relativity, which showed that when a massive star
dies, it leaves behind a small, dense remnant core. If the core's mass is more
than about three times the mass of the Sun, the equations showed, the force
of gravity overwhelms all other forces and produces a black hole. Scientists
can't directly observe black holes with telescopes that detect x-rays, light, or
other forms of electromagnetic radiation. We can, however, infer the presence
of black holes and study them by detecting their effect on other matter
nearby. If a black hole passes through a cloud of interstellar matter, for
example, it will draw matter inward in a process known as accretion. A similar
process can occur if a normal star passes close to a black hole. In this case, the
black hole can tear the star apart as it pulls it toward itself. As the attracted
matter accelerates and heats up, it emits x-rays that radiate into space. Recent
discoveries offer some tantalizing evidence that black holes have a dramatic
influence on the neighbourhoods around them - emitting powerful gamma ray
bursts, devouring nearby stars, and spurring the growth of new stars in some
areas while stalling it in others.

One Star's End is a Black Hole's Beginning

Most black holes form from the remnants of a large star that dies in a
supernova explosion. (Smaller stars become dense neutron stars, which are
not massive enough to trap light.) If the total mass of the star is large enough
(about three times the mass of the Sun), it can be proven theoretically that no
force can keep the star from collapsing under the influence of gravity.
However, as the star collapses, a strange thing occurs. As the surface of the
star nears an imaginary surface called the "event horizon," time on the star
slows relative to the time kept by observers far away. When the surface
reaches the event horizon, time stands still, and the star can collapse no more -
it is a frozen collapsing object. Even bigger black holes can result from stellar
collisions. Soon after its launch in December 2004, NASA's Swift telescope
observed the powerful, fleeting flashes of light known as gamma ray bursts.
Chandra and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope later collected data from the
event's "afterglow," and together the observations led astronomers to
conclude that the powerful explosions can result when a black hole and a
neutron star collide, producing another black hole.
Conclusion
Neither wormholes or black holes have actually ever been seen directly, even
with the sophisticated equipment in use today, but both follow inevitably
from Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, and plenty of indirect
evidence has been obtained (at least for black holes). The ideas have certainly
been more than readily accepted by the science fiction community, for whom
they suggest intriguing possibilities. One of the most famous black
hole theorists, the British physicist Stephen Hawking, proposed the four laws
of black hole mechanics back in the 1960s, and calculated in 1974 that black
holes should thermally create and emit sub-atomic particles, known today
as Hawking radiation, until they eventually exhaust their energy and evaporate.
Yet, as recently as 2004, he admitted to losing a bet he made with the Caltech
physicists Kip Thorne and John Reskill, and overturned his long-held belief that
any “information” crossing the event horizon of a black hole is lost to
our universe, and is now convinced that black holes will eventually transmit,
albeit in a garbled form as we perceive it in our observable universe,
information about all matter they swallow (“information” in this sense may be
loosely defined as “that which can distinguish one thing from another”, and
essentially refers to the identity of a thing and all of its properties). This is a
good indication that the theory is far from cut and dried, and research (both
theory and observation) into this challenging area proceeds unabated. As an
example of the complexity of the subject matter, a short quote from Professor
Hawking’s 2004 presentation may suffice: “The Euclidean path integral over all
topologically trivial metrics can be done by time slicing and so is unitary when
analytically continued to the Lorentzian”.

Bibliography
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https://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/topics_blackholes_conclusion.html

https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/black-holes
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https://www.researchgate.net/