this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2025
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Astronomy

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[–] technohacker 5 points 2 months ago (7 children)

Gonna hijack this post to ask a somewhat related but possibly stupid question, would it be possible that instead of a singularity there happened to be a region of space with non-negligible size (ie, not a point sized region) that acted like a well instead? Things could "fall" into that well and not be able to escape, but it's not like everything in the well is at a single point.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (5 children)

I may be misunderstanding your question, but black holes are regions of space that have non-negligible size; the boundary between what can escape and what can't is called the event horizon. The singularity is what happens at the center.

[–] technohacker 2 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Ah right I worded that wrong, sorry!

I guess what I mean to say is, would a non-negligible sized "singularity" (I know I'm messing with that term quite a bit, I'll stray from the mathematical definition) be consistent with our current theories?

[–] gnutrino 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Depends what you mean by "our current theories". In classical General Relatively the answer is pretty conclusively no but many people think that a quantum theory of gravity should be able to remove the singularities. In fact, this article is about an attempt to do just that with a fairly natural extension to GR (albeit one that is only mathematically tractable in 5 or more dimensions) and seems to have succeeded for the static spherically symmetric case at least.

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