Skip to main content

Are "naked black holes" real?

 



Now that those of us with a lively but an amateur interest in cosmology have sort-of gotten our heads around the idea of a black hole, we have to wrestle with an odd variant, the "naked black hole" -- i.e the black hole that can be observed from outside.

We amateurs understand or think we understand that the inner workings of a black hole cannot be observed from outside its boundary, formally known as its "event horizon". Hence the adjective "black". Yet the James Webb telescope seems now to be saying -- yes, maybe we can. Perhaps sometimes we can observe the singularity, the point at the Senate where gravity becomes infinite and all laws seem to break down. 

Here is one take on this.

https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2025/09/this-naked-black-hole-shouldnt-exist.html

One thing that us amateurs think we know about black holes is that they form from the collapse of a star in upon itself.  Hossenfelder says that the naked black holes did not form that way, they are too "primordial" for that. She also indicates that they may satisfy a prediction of Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MoND), a theory I expounded briefly in this very blog a couple of weeks ago.

But I haven't wrapped my own head around any of this yet so I'll just leave this post as an IOU to myself. 

Labels:

Comments

  1. Paul D. Van PeltSeptember 28, 2025 at 3:14 PM

    I have heard of SH, whether with esses or aitches. I wonder: how far back must we go to exceed the farthest reaches of the primordial? Inquiring minds want to know. I too, am trying to wrap my mind around some far reaches, though those appear to be more practical goals than establishment of boundary(ies) for naked black holes. Granted, I am not a physicist, theoretical or otherwise. Perhaps, only perhaps, *primordial* is the wrong quadrant of time for the characterization SH sought.? Maybe, extraterrestrial? Or, as a practical matter, it is tout le meme chose? Can't ask a dinosaur. They are not talking. Well, maybe metaphorically? Hmmmmm...

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
10 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
21 comments
Read more

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...
2 comments
Read more