Years after ripping stars to shreds, 24 black holes suddenly flared up with radio waves in inexplicable 'burping' bouts. Half of all star-killing black holes may experience the same.
I wonder if it’s going to turn out to be analogous to throwing a ball into a cylinder, where some of the matter enters at a precise trajectory that basically causes it to bounce back out? Assuming nothing is actually exiting from the event horizon, maybe there’s some sort of stratification of the elements within the accretion disk? Or maybe there are oddly hyper-stable orbits, why they’re lasting years, and it’s analogous to the way a coin can take a very long time to settle when falling on its side.
It seems less likely that there’s a mechanism by which something can actually cross the event horizon from inside, but who knows, new physics might be out there to have something to say about it.
Edit: I’d be REALLY curious to know whether the time interval of the delay is correlated with the half-life of any radioactive elements that would be present in the devoured star.
My guess is the event horizon has always been viewed as this perfectly spherical (or oblate spherical) construct - I bet it is much more messy than that. I bet the event horizon moves around and the movement allows for materials to be ejected.
I wonder if it’s going to turn out to be analogous to throwing a ball into a cylinder, where some of the matter enters at a precise trajectory that basically causes it to bounce back out? Assuming nothing is actually exiting from the event horizon, maybe there’s some sort of stratification of the elements within the accretion disk? Or maybe there are oddly hyper-stable orbits, why they’re lasting years, and it’s analogous to the way a coin can take a very long time to settle when falling on its side.
It seems less likely that there’s a mechanism by which something can actually cross the event horizon from inside, but who knows, new physics might be out there to have something to say about it.
Edit: I’d be REALLY curious to know whether the time interval of the delay is correlated with the half-life of any radioactive elements that would be present in the devoured star.
Inside a black hole is in theory timeless, so HL doesn’t have any relative meaning to us.
My guess is the event horizon has always been viewed as this perfectly spherical (or oblate spherical) construct - I bet it is much more messy than that. I bet the event horizon moves around and the movement allows for materials to be ejected.