Out of Pod Experience

You should re-read that entire passage:

The bolded part indicates that the radiation comes from within the schwarzschild radius, i.e. within the black hole. What it's saying is "it's not the entire black hole radiating, but little bits of it just within the edge." Furthermore, this is only a high level conceptual overview. A slightly more indepth analysis:


Again, the bolded part is important. An electron-positron pair (most likely) is generated within the black hole. One of them effectively tunnels through a potential barrier (this is still a rough simplification of the actual mechanism) to the "outside" of the black hole. So the emission is still coming from within the black hole as defined by its schwarzschild radius.

The whole imaginary thing is implied by the "virtual particle" bit. Also, black holes are formally defined by the schwarzschild radius, so yes that is exactly what a black hole is.

To be honest, both of the passages we discussed are gobledygook for the consumption of the layman with no understanding of the rigorous formalism which produces the results in question. There are other theories which stipulate that the entire body of the black hole as a whole must radiate:


We could quote wikipedia all day. What is generally not in dispute in the physics community is that due to the Unruh effect and the equivalence principle (both of which effectively boil down to conservation of energy) is that black holes, as defined by the Schwarzschild radius, must emit some form of black body radiation (light) from within that Schwarzschild radius. A somewhat rigorous treatment of this can be found in the Wikipedia article beginning in the "Emission Process" section.

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A lot of people tend to get confused by the term "black hole." In simplest terms, a black hole is nothing more than a body who's gravitational pull prohibits a photon, incident on the event horizion (or Schwarzschild radius) from escaping. This actually isn't anything special in and of itself. Some blackholes, like Sagittarius A*, are so large that they have an average density less than that of the water you drink every day and a gravity of ~0.1 G at the event horizon, which has a radius over 42 AU. You can think of photons trapped in such a black hole as merely being pulled into it's orbit, like the moon is orbiting earth, or the earth orbiting the sun.

Where our understanding of physics breaks down is the smaller black holes (and the center of larger ones), where gravity and the ensuing tidal forces are so strong that matter is compressed into dimensions for which we have no physical understanding. When matter is compressed beyond a certain size limit, we have no idea how physics works. And within these black holes are the only known locations in the universe where matter can be compressed to such a degree.

A black hole is black.

The outside edge of a black hole looks pretty neat though.

Well the thing about black holes, their main redeeming quality, is that they're black. And th thing about space is, it's black. Anyone could have made that mistake really.

You're being pedantic.
Stop.

i think u see the light being sucked into it

You can't grasp their true form, they are unspeakable!

Like Cthullu. Or Galactus!

Take a good hard look at goatse that's what it looks like.

I would think the appearance of a black hole would dramatically change relative to your point of observation. The singularity itself can't be viewed directly, as I understand it, because it's folded space itself so hard it's pushing the boundary of a deeeeep gravity well. While not technically dropping out of space time, it may as well have. A viewer from some great distance might see the light from stars being warped and doubled all around the object though. That would be detectible and would probably look very strange. If the black hole is consuming a star or a gas cloud, the accretion disk (outside the schwartzwald radius) would be visible as well. Brilliant, hot rings would be visible, and appear extremely distorted and warped to that far off observer. If you were very near the rings they might just appear comparable to Saturn. Accretion disk aside, someone falling into a black hole might not see anything at all. For that observer, the light is bent around their position in such a way that it appears as though nothing is amiss at all.

...but wtf do I know about black holes. We've yet to directly observe one. They are such weird and poorly understood objects, I'd be very cautious of anyone claiming to know with an absolute degree of confidence wtf they look like.

Maybe they look like EvE wormholes. Maybe they look like Cheerios. Who knows?

I just thought the vid was interesting, as was the explanation about how light and space are being bent outside the event horizon. We have black holes, this was about black holes... thought you guys would dig it.