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Dark energy from supermassive black holes? Physicists spar over radical idea

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Re: Dark energy from supermassive black holes? Physicists spar over radical idea

#61
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "squashed into spaghetti" occurs in "normal space" before you get to the black hole, for most black holes. It is not an effect of anything special about black holes, it's just plain ol' normal tidal effects, turned up to eleven, then turned up until the knob breaks, then turned up some more. Neutron stars will give you a bad day with tidal effects too long before you reach their surface. Very large black holes tu…

To an outside observer it would look like you were torn apart by tidal forces, but would it feel that way to you? Or would you feel normal? If it's just space being curved, would you feel nothing just like you feel nothing in freefall? I'm sure this question is wrong...

The "tidal effect" here is due the difference in gravity experienced by parts of you at different distances from the gravity source.

Imagine your feet pulled downward hard enough that your bones stretch and/or snap, while you are squished in from the sides. And then more. You'd become a long thin strand of matter, no longer in the shape of a human and no longer feeling anything. It's not "just a ride down" where things feel locally normal, and it's not a phenomenon about black holes, as some stars can do that to you too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification

Re: Dark energy from supermassive black holes? Physicists spar over radical idea

#62
post #2

> He also says the numbers don’t seem to add up: Dark energy is known to make up 70% of the mass-energy of the universe, whereas black holes are a mere fraction of the ordinary matter, which constitutes less than 5% of the universe So it seems both the missing dark energy and the missing dark matter could both be explained for, if there were far more black holes in our universe than we're currently aware of?

The remaining ~25-27% is suspected to be dark matter.

Re: Dark energy from supermassive black holes? Physicists spar over radical idea

#63
post #19

Correct me if I'm wrong (please), but don't we still lack any kind of fundamental definition of what dark energy/matter is other than..."the cause of the difference between what is calculated, and what is observed"? To the point that we aren't even really sure that there is such a "thing" as dark matter (in that it exists in any conventional sense)? From Wikipedia: "Dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter though…

Dark matter is the name for unexplained mass that doesn't interact like typical matter. The existence of such mass is needed because there are galaxies that don't match what is predicted by general relativity. So either general relativity is wrong on the particular predications or there is extra matter. The universe is expanding. However, not only is it expanding, but the expansion is accelerating. It isn't clear wha…

> People have tried several times to explain the observations that led to dark matter

The observations that led to Dark Matter have been sufficiently explained without the need for Dark Matter.[1] Apparently, subsequent observations that got lumped into Dark Matter have not yet been sufficiently explained, and Science is paradigmatic, so Dark Matter persists.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL0ewiwqoTw

Re: Dark energy from supermassive black holes? Physicists spar over radical idea

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dark matter is overfitted. This isn’t some comparative advantage it has. The number of parameters you set manually in many of these models is insane. We are fundamentally missing something. Thankfully it’s just not all that important for us right now.

I mean, we already know about existing "dark" matter particles. The Neutrino comes to mind, though it's not massive enough to explain the gravitational phenomena. LCDM really isn't that weird or unexpected, since it's a lot like what we already observe, and we already think more particles should exist.

Neutrinos aren't dark matter.

Re: Dark energy from supermassive black holes? Physicists spar over radical idea

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give examples of these parameters that must be set manually?

These are the free parameters of the Standard Model https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Model#Construction_...

Every one of those parameters is associated with a field that does symmetry breaking. Every one of those fields has a particle associated. Every one of those particles has been observed, studied, and found to have properties in line with what would be required for the fields to have the values that we measure.

So yes, that's a lot of free parameters. But they are intrinsic to the theory. And we have considerable experimental evidence that they represent something real.

For those who don't know what symmetry breaking is, the Standard Model has a lot more symmetries than the observed universe. For example the theory does not specify that electromagnetism is long range while the strong nuclear force is short range. Or that the muon weighs more than the electron. But for each symmetry in the theory that we don't see in practice, there is a field that specifies the value of the observed asymmetry. Each field is carried by a particle. Each particle has properties that reflect the value of all of the fields. Every particle has been found and almost all have the predicted properties (to within measurement error).

The last particle found was the Higgs boson. The Higgs field determines the relative masses of different particles.

The "almost all" is the fact that the neutrino has 3 versions and oscillates between them in flight. Also the neutrino is not massless. While the Standard Theory can adapt to match this, this isn't what was originally predicted.

Re: Dark energy from supermassive black holes? Physicists spar over radical idea

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dark matter is overfitted. This isn’t some comparative advantage it has. The number of parameters you set manually in many of these models is insane. We are fundamentally missing something. Thankfully it’s just not all that important for us right now.

I mean, we already know about existing "dark" matter particles. The Neutrino comes to mind, though it's not massive enough to explain the gravitational phenomena. LCDM really isn't that weird or unexpected, since it's a lot like what we already observe, and we already think more particles should exist.

Hypothetical "dark matter" doesn't interact with ordinary matter, except gravitationally. Neutrinos do interact with ordinary matter; otherwise we wouldn't be able to build neutrino detectors. Therefore neutrinos are not an example of dark matter.

Re: Dark energy from supermassive black holes? Physicists spar over radical idea

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, we already know about existing "dark" matter particles. The Neutrino comes to mind, though it's not massive enough to explain the gravitational phenomena. LCDM really isn't that weird or unexpected, since it's a lot like what we already observe, and we already think more particles should exist.

Neutrinos aren't dark matter.

They are, because they have mass and don't interact electromagnetically. They are just not cold dark matter, because their mass is so low they behave more like radiation than matter, i.e. the scale as a^4 instead of a^3, where a is the scale factor. A sterile neutrino, if it existed, could still be a dark matter candidate.

Re: Dark energy from supermassive black holes? Physicists spar over radical idea

#68

Here's a question I'm not even remotely qualified to ask: could it be that supermassive black holes cause a contraction of local spacetime in a way that gives the impression that local space is static while distant space expands? I think this mechanism would be largely indistinguishable from classic hubble expansion, at least on local scales.

That's a good question and is not exactly easy to answer. The Einstein field equations of General Relativity are highly non-linear which makes it difficult to talk about superpositions of solutions to the equations and to compare local physics (at the level of black holes) to cosmological effects (e.g. the expansion of the universe) and transfer results and insights between them.

Let me explain. When we talk about cosmology in general and the (accelerated) expansion of the universe in particular, we zoom out to very large scales and consider a homogenous model of the universe (a so-called FLRW spacetime[0]). Here, homogeneity means that mass density, hubble rate and so on are the same across the universe and only depend on time.

We then deduce that at this scale and under these assumptions we need to incorporate an additional parameter Λ, called cosmological constant aka dark energy, into our field equations / cosmological solution in order to match observations.[1]

Homogeneity was a simplifying assumption, though! Our universe is clearly not homogeneous! Next to your head, there is air, and inside your head evidently not :), and so the mass density is clearly not constant across space!

The same thing holds for black holes: Outside a black hole there's vacuum, inside a black hole there is… Well, we don't really know but the mass from which it formed has gotta be somewhere, right? So the mass density in black hole spacetimes is presumably not constant, either.

Interestingly, we know that spacetime near other celestial bodies (galaxies, stars, planets, moons, …) can be approximately described by one of the black hole spacetimes, too. (This is because outer region of black hole spacetimes describes not just black holes but any spherically or axially symmetric static/stationary spacetime.) So it's turtl—… uhh outer black hole spacetimes all the way down!

Anyway, in those cases of stars/planets/moons we have some massive object in the center of the spacetime region and vacuum outside – once more, the mass density is clearly non-zero!

So how do we square this with the homogeneity assumption of our cosmolical model (ΛCDM)? We can't but that's perfectly fine from a logical point of view. The reason is that we cannot simply take all those local spacetimes (of all stars, planets and black holes) and simply add them up to obtain the spacetime of the entire universe, because the field equations are not linear. Adding up two solutions does in general not yield a third solution! Conversely, we cannot simply zoom in on the FLRW spacetime and then compare a local, perfectly homogeneous "snippet" of FLRW with a black hole spacetime – this comparison does not make sense a priori.

Unfortunately, the reality is we simply don't know how to zoom in / zoom out between different spacetimes at different scales. So while we have a cosmological constant at large scales (when assuming homogeneity), there is no guarantee such a constant makes sense at smaller scales, i.e. that there is expansion at smaller scales.

This is because there are two possible ways to interpret the cosmological constant: One way is to interpret it as a fixed parameter in the field equations (i.e. it influences every solution), another way is to interpret it as a term in the specific large-scale spacetime solution of our universe (i.e. ΛCDM) and shove it into that solution's energy-momentum tensor.

Now, I think most physicists adhere to the first interpretation and assume that the constant is the same across all scales and possibly even homogeneous. Thus it should impact all spacetime solutions in the same way and at all scales, including black hole solutions.

For this reason people have introduced modified black hole solutions that, like our cosmological model, take into account a positive cosmological constant (= "de Sitter"), for instance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Sitter%E2%80%93Schwarzschil...

As you suspected, in these solutions you generally have both effects that counteract each other: The gravitational pull of the black hole (leading to an event horizon) and the expansion of the universe ("anti-gravitational pull") due to the cosmological constant, leading to a cosmological horizon in the region far away from the black hole.

Nevertheless, whether you believe in/consider a cosmological constant at small scales is a bit up to you. Most people I know seem assume that space at the level of atoms, planets, solar systems or even galaxies is not expanding and only very far away from gravitational systems you'll end up with expansion. This is supported by the fact that the cosmological constant is so tiny and, thus, in the aforementioned De Sitter black hole solutions, the cosmological horizon is far, far away from the center – so far indeed (111 (M/Msolar)1/3 parsecs[2]) that we know this outside region of the spacetime can no longer be valid/applicable.

To see the latter, remember that black hole solutions assume a perfect vacuum away from the central body (black hole/star/planet/…) but in reality no massive body is alone in the universe. This means that, before you reach a distance of 111 (M/Msolar)1/3 parsecs from a given body, you'll long have encountered another couple massive bodies which will modify your spacetime and cause additional gravitational pull. (Once again, how exactly they modify spacetime we don't know (short of maybe some numerical approximations), since we can't easily superpose spacetimes!)

Long story short: Only in very few situations it's worth considering a cosmological constant at small scales. Its effects are easily cancelled out / hidden by local gravity.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedmann%E2%80%93Lema%C3%AEtr...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda-CDM_model

[2]: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020AAS...23537904F/abstra...

Re: Dark energy from supermassive black holes? Physicists spar over radical idea

#69
What is going on with titles? Do physicists really put on boxing gloves hoping that physical violence will resolve a scientific argument? Is this a new widely accepted approach?

I find this level of editorializing ridiculous to the point of insulting.

I don’t need the imagery of violence to boost my curiosity about a new discovery.

Re: Dark energy from supermassive black holes? Physicists spar over radical idea

#70

Here's a question I'm not even remotely qualified to ask: could it be that supermassive black holes cause a contraction of local spacetime in a way that gives the impression that local space is static while distant space expands? I think this mechanism would be largely indistinguishable from classic hubble expansion, at least on local scales.

> could it be that supermassive black holes cause a contraction of local spacetime in a way that gives the impression that local space is static while distant space expands?

No. That's not how the spacetime geometry around black holes works.

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