Jillian's Guide to Black Holes: Forming - Types - Outside - Inside - Finding - References - Websites

Bibliography:

Harrison, Edward R.; Cosmology: the Science of the Universe; Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
ISBN 052166148X

Ferris, Timothy; The Whole Shebang: a State-of-the-Universe(s) Report; Simon and Schuster, New York
ISBN 0-684-81020-4

Mook, Delo E., Vargish, Thomas; Inside Relativity; Princeton University Press, Princeton
ISBN 0-691-02520-7

various Astronomy magazines

Space Telescope Science Institute and Hubble Space Telescope Public Information

• STScI-PR97-28: Hubble finds a bare black hole pouring out light
• STScI-PR97-18: Fireworks near a black hole in the core of Seyfert galaxy NGC 4151
• STScI-PR97-01: Massive black holes dwell in most galaxies, according to Hubble census
• STScI-PR96-23a: Super-sharp view of the doomed star Eta Carinæ
• STScI-PR94-23: Hubble confirms existence of massive black hole at the heart of active galaxy

Begelman, Mitchell, Rees, Martin; Gravity's Fatal Attraction; HAW, New York
ISBN 0-7167-5074-0

Einstein, Albert; Relativity; Three Rivers Press, New York
ISBN 0-517-88441-0

Works Cited:

Space Telescope Science Institute and Hubble Space Telescope Public Information

STScI-PR97-12: Record of a black hole's signature

Quasar picture and information credits:
A Survey of Quasar Host Galaxies, by John Bahcall( Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton), Mike Disney (University of Wales) and NASA

Galaxy picture and information credits:

STScI-PR95-47:
"The key results are:

• Supermassive black holes are so common, nearly every large galaxy has one.
• A black hole's mass is proportional to the mass of the host galaxy, so that, for example, a galaxy twice as massive as another would have a black hole that is also twice as massive. This discovery suggests that the growth of the black hole is linked to the formation of the galaxy in which it is located.
• The number and masses of the black holes found are consistent with what would have been required to power the quasars."

STScI-PR96-23a: "Eta Carinæ was the site of a giant outburst about 150 years ago, when it became one of the brightest stars in the southern sky."

1: page 287 of The Cosmic Frontiers of General Relativity:

"Indeed, only those primordial black holes with masses greater than a few billion tons (10¹⁵ grams) could have survived up to the present time. Therefore, if scientists ever find primordial black holes in space, they would be at least as massive as a typical asteroid yet probably no bigger than an atom. These very tiny objects would be recognized because they emit incredible amounts of energy, probably in the form of very "hard" gamma rays."
Tiny, light, and hot as---er, yeah. I imagine they'd be real easy to spot. Most emitters of gamma rays are not that small.

2: page 286 of The Cosmic Frontiers of General Relativity:

"The total amount of energy released during the final second of evaporation is equivalent to a billion megaton hydrogen bombs!"

3: Page 285 of The Cosmic Frontiers of General Relativity:

"Consequently, these quantum-mechanical effects discovered by Hawking are totally unimportant in massive black holes..<reference to a figure>...Black holes whose masses are greater than the mass of the earth have temperatures less than a tenth of a degree above absolute zero."
Considering that the cosmic background radiation is ± 2° or 3° Kelvin, I figured it's miniscule by comparison, since most black holes have masses much greater than that of the earth.

4: page 156 of The Cosmic Frontiers of General Relativity:

"In 1975 a team of scientists from Berkeley and Houston announced that they had discovered a magnetic monopole in one of their experiments."
I think it was a fluke experiment like the room-temperature fusion experiment. Ah, well.

5: page 159 of (I must really have enjoyed this book) The Cosmic Frontiers of General Relativity:

"This condition violates the famous "law of cosmic censorship" proposed by Roger Penrose. This idea states that "Thou shalt not have naked singularities!"
Hmm. Well, since no one can describe with any accuracy what a singularity looks like (and perhaps because the curvature of spacetime is infinite), physicists get nervous when told that such things can exist in the Real World. Fair enough. I'd get nervous tremors if I had to describe something that had not a steady shape but a selection of possible shapes.

6: page 181 of The Cosmic Frontiers of Relativity:

"In 1974,[sic] Kip S. Thorne published realistic calculations involving black holes. He showed that, under reasonable circumstances, a black hole would be expected to be rotating at the special or canonical value of a = 99.8% M. This is very rapid indeed."
This means that the two event horizons are practically on top of one another. Someone could survive a trip through 'em both (not considering the blue sheet, of course). This also means that the ergosphere of a typical rotating black hole really billows out, which is very useful for finding such a black hole, I think.

7: page 141 The Cosmic Frontiers of General Relativity:

"In order to appreciate more fully the nature of the Kruskal-Szekeres geometry, it is instructive to slice up the Kruskal-Szekeres diagram along spacelike sheets. These sheets will provide embedding diagrams of the warping of space around a black hole. This technique of slicing space-time[sic] along spacelike hypersurfaces was employed earlier..."
Anyway, that's where I got the picture from. The only thing that does not make sense about the whole situation is the time involved. An eternal wormhole pinches off so quickly that not even light can get through. This would involved spacetime changing at or greater than the speed of light. It's okay if it pinches off at the speed of light, but greater than...eh, that's tricky and no one likes Faster-Than-Light particles.

8: page 197 of The Cosmic Frontiers of General Relativity:

"Figure 12-8 is simply a continuation of Figure 12-5 and is again based on calclulations by C. T. Cunningham. The important fact to notice from the paths of these light rays is that near the center of the black hole they are bent away from the singularity. Although gravity far from the center of a Kerr black hole is attractive and pulls things inward, near the singularity gravity is repulsive and tries to push things out!"
Yup, I am grateful to C. T. Cunningham for the easy-to-understand pictures of various light rays hitting the singularity. I tried drawing embedding diagrams by hand and realized that some things are best left to computer drawing programs.

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