[Physics] Does any particle ever reach any singularity inside the black hole

black-holesevent-horizongeneral-relativityobserverssingularities

I am not a professional physicist, so I may say something rubbish in here, but this question has always popped in my mind every time I read or hear anyone speak of particles hitting singularities and "weird things happen".

Now to the question at hand, please follow my slow reasoning… As far as I've learned, to reach a black hole singularity, you must first cross an event horizon. The event horizon has this particular property of putting the external universe on an infinite speed to the falling observer. Now due to the Hawking radiation, and knowing that the cosmic background radiation is slowly dimming, sooner or later every black hole in this particular instance of inflation we are living in will evaporate, according to an external observer of said black holes.

This means that every black hole has a finite timespan, as long as this universe survives that long. Now if we go back to the falling observer, we had already established that such an observer would see the outside universe "speed up" infinitely. This means that when the falling observer "hits" the event horizon, he will (or it if we speak about particles, which is clearer in this case), be immediately transported in time towards the final evaporation moment of the black hole. Either this or the particle gets some weird treatment. My point is, such a particle never gets to the singularity, because it has no time to get to it. The moment it crosses the event horizon, the black hole itself evaporates.

Where am I wrong here?

Best Answer

Indeed you made one mistake: the infalling observer does not see the outside universe "speed up". Look at what happens in a space-time diagram. At the spacetime point where your astronaut passes the horizon, he can only see what's in his past light cone, and that's the universe at early times only. It's the signals that he sends back (or tries to) that reach the outsine world only at infinite times.

Thus, the observing astronaut sees his black hole as it is long before any evaporation sets in, so his black hole is still there. Now leaving aside some other quantum issues, where opinions aren't completely settled and perhaps even our presently used language could be inapropriate, the observer just continues on, and in a finite amount of time, very quickly unless the black hole were more than millions of times heavier than the sun, he is killed by the central singularity.

In a black hole with high angular momentum (Kerr black hole), the singularity takes the form of a ring along the equator, and the astronaut might try to sail past it safely, and he would be able to enter into a strange new universe where he may or may not leave a negative mass black hole behind him, were it not that debris from other objects that fall in later will kill him before that happens, and while trying to pass a second horizon, he will be killed because that second horizon is unstable.