General Relativity – Does All Matter in a Black Hole Fall into Its Center Singular Point?

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I'm not sure whether a collapsing star which forms a black hole actually must collapse to a single point. In the Schwarzschild Metric for a given r it is assumed, that all matter is below r. Therefore, a particle is always moving on a time like trajectory and inside Rs all such trajectories end up at r=0. But this doesn't take into account that only a part of the total mass is below any actual point within the star. Comparing with earth's gravitational field, I would assume that gravitation gets smaller when going into the massive star. Doesn't that have an influence on the geometry? To take an extreme example, what about of a sphere with a void inside? I see no reason why all matter should end up in the center, because there is – at least classically – not even an attractive force within the void. The same consideration could be done when assuming constant density of the star and the radius we consider gets smaller and smaller. What counts for the outer mass to be attracted to the center? Is it only the inner mass? If yes, this attraction gets smaller an smaller as we move towards the center. Why is there a point like singularity, where all of the mass of the Black Hole will concentrate? I know, this is totally handwaving, but what would be the effect of not taking a point mass for calculating the metric? I hope it became clear, what I mean…

Best Answer

The collapsing star can be treated as a sequence of three cases: first, a star which is not collapsing, then the situation during collapse, then the final black hole with a singularity and vacuum everywhere else.

For a star which is not collapsing, let's first compare with the situation in Newtonian gravity for a uniform spherical ball. Outside the ball the gravitational field falls away as $GM/r^2$. But inside the ball it is different: the field is $G M r/R^3$. And the case of an empty shell is different again (no field at all inside the shell). The corresponding situation for a spherical star in General Relativity is that outside the star we have the Schwarzschild metric and inside the star there is another metric. It will depend on the matter distribution. It does not have any singularity and it will reproduce the Newtonian predictions in the limit of small density.

So far so good.

Now suppose our star undergoes gravitational collapse. At first there will not be anything special happening at the centre, except that the density there is growing. But if at any stage the matter within some $r$ has a mass such that the Schwarzschild radius associated with that mass is greater than or equal to $r$, then we have that this part of the star, at least, has fallen past a horizon and cannot emerge. In this case that matter cannot avoid falling to $r=0$ and the density there will increase in a run-away process; no force is strong enough to prevent it. Of course whenever we encounter a singularity we must suspect that our physical model is running out of validity but the main point is that either the curvature goes to infinity or some other unknown physics intervenes.

What happens to any mass which is not within a horizon is that either it may be thrown off if there is any sort of explosive or radiative process going on, or else it too will fall and will eventually cross a horizon. Or it could end up in orbit if we have some angular momentum, but this won't happen in a spherically symmetric case. But any matter which does fall inwards past a horizon will then reach the singularity in a small amount of proper time.

All the above uses the terminology of "first this, then that" somewhat loosely. If we adopt coordinate time as in the Schwarzschild metric then the collapse process will itself be infinitely slow near the horizon, such that the coordinate time for events where material crosses the horizon is infinity. Then you have all the usual puzzles about how to discuss this fact without confusing ourselves.

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