DaveC426913
Valued Senior Member
Look, black holes have got to be one of the simplest things in all of nature.
Forget event horizons and forget singularities and the other stuff.
Mass creates gravity. This is fundamental.
More mass creates more gravity.
That's it. That's all.
Add enough mass, and gravity crushes the matter together until it's super dense.
You can just keep adding mass (because that's what gravity does).
An atom consists of electrons in orbitals around a nucleus. Those orbitals have a lot of force keeping them going, but it's not infinite.
If you add enough mass, the pressure literally overwhelms the force keeping the electrons in their orbitals, and they get crushed into the nucleus. You get a mass of just neutrons. Just a solid ball of neutrons, all packed, touching together.
Neutrons have a lot of force keeping them as neutrons, but that too is not infinite.
Add more mass, and the pressure overwhelms even the solid structure of a mass made of neutrons packed together.
The neutrons themselves collapse.
Here's the kicker: We don't know what happens to matter when it gets crushed down from a neutron to something smaller.
But we know it happens. Gravity is relentless.
A black hole is nothing more than that. It's what happens when so much mass is crushed together that it overwhelms the forces that keep atoms ... as atoms.
That's it. That's all there is.
When we talk about the singularity, all it means is this: we don't know what matter looks like when its crushed smaller than an atom. We don't have the physics to describe it yet. That's all it means.
But rest assured, we know the collapse of matter does happen. It has happened. The simple process of accumulation of matter leads to collapse and, once started, is inevitable. We have models describing how it happens, even if those models stop short of the end-product. And we now have pictures, proving that all our science up to this point was borne out by nature.
It's as simple as that.
Forget event horizons and forget singularities and the other stuff.
Mass creates gravity. This is fundamental.
More mass creates more gravity.
That's it. That's all.
Add enough mass, and gravity crushes the matter together until it's super dense.
You can just keep adding mass (because that's what gravity does).
An atom consists of electrons in orbitals around a nucleus. Those orbitals have a lot of force keeping them going, but it's not infinite.
If you add enough mass, the pressure literally overwhelms the force keeping the electrons in their orbitals, and they get crushed into the nucleus. You get a mass of just neutrons. Just a solid ball of neutrons, all packed, touching together.
Neutrons have a lot of force keeping them as neutrons, but that too is not infinite.
Add more mass, and the pressure overwhelms even the solid structure of a mass made of neutrons packed together.
The neutrons themselves collapse.
Here's the kicker: We don't know what happens to matter when it gets crushed down from a neutron to something smaller.
But we know it happens. Gravity is relentless.
A black hole is nothing more than that. It's what happens when so much mass is crushed together that it overwhelms the forces that keep atoms ... as atoms.
That's it. That's all there is.
When we talk about the singularity, all it means is this: we don't know what matter looks like when its crushed smaller than an atom. We don't have the physics to describe it yet. That's all it means.
But rest assured, we know the collapse of matter does happen. It has happened. The simple process of accumulation of matter leads to collapse and, once started, is inevitable. We have models describing how it happens, even if those models stop short of the end-product. And we now have pictures, proving that all our science up to this point was borne out by nature.
It's as simple as that.