From Dr. Becky.
AD – Go to https://ground.news/drbecky to stay fully informed with the latest Space and Science news. Save 40% off the Vantage plan through my link for unlimited access | Nothing can escape a black hole; what’s going on inside that point of no return past the event horizon is completely unknown to us. Is all the matter crushed down into an infinitely dense, infinitely small point known as a singularity? Or is something else going on? Annoyingly, under the laws of physics as we understand them, cosmic censorship says will never know what happens beyond the event horizon. Or will we? Because when we run the maths, using Einstein’s equations of general relativity, and sprinkling in a little quantum mechanics, out pops the idea of naked singularities – infinitely dense regions of space, without an event horizon shielding them from view. Singularities that we might be able to see, and observe, to work out what does happen when matter collapses down to infinite density. Now this is all still hypothetical, we’ve never found a naked singularity out there in the universe yet, although some objects have come tantalisingly close to looking like one…
00:00 Introduction
03:24 A refresh on general relativity and black holes
06:10 What is a naked singularity?
09:55 Have we found any in the Universe?!
12:01 Bloopers
Hawking & Penrose (1970) – https://www.jstor.org/stable/2416467?origin=ads
Penrose (1974) – https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1974IAUS…64…82P
Ori & Piran (1990) – https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.42.1068
Anders et al. (2018) – https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-023-02040-7
Chakraborty & Battacharyya (2018) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01156
Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV
Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: https://www.fiverr.com/mgs_editing
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👩🏽💻 I’m Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don’t know. If you’ve ever wondered about something in space and couldn’t find an answer online – you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.
