Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Ring singularity
Summary
A ring singularity or ringularity is the gravitational singularity of a rotating black hole, or a Kerr black hole, that is shaped like a ring.
When a spherical non-rotating body of a critical radius collapses under its own gravitation under general relativity, theory suggests it will collapse to a 0-dimensional single point. This is not the case with a rotating black hole (a Kerr black hole). With a fluid rotating body, its distribution of mass is not spherical (it shows an equatorial bulge), and it has angular momentum. Since a point cannot support rotation or angular momentum in classical physics (general relativity being a classical theory), the minimal shape of the singularity that can support these properties is instead a 2D ring with zero thickness but non-zero radius, and this is referred to as a ringularity or Kerr singularity.
A rotating hole's rotational frame-dragging effects, described by the Kerr metric, causes spacetime in the vicinity of the ring to undergo curvature in the direction of the ring's motion. Effectively this means that different observers placed around a Kerr black hole who are asked to point to the hole's apparent center of gravity may point to different points on the ring. Falling objects will begin to acquire angular momentum from the ring before they actually strike it, and the path taken by a perpendicular light ray (initially traveling toward the ring's center) will curve in the direction of ring motion before intersecting with the ring.
An observer crossing the event horizon of a non-rotating and uncharged black hole (a Schwarzschild black hole) cannot avoid the central singularity, which lies in the future world line of everything within the horizon. Thus one cannot avoid spaghettification by the tidal forces of the central singularity.
This is not necessarily true with a Kerr black hole. An observer falling into a Kerr black hole may be able to avoid the central singularity by making clever use of the inner event horizon associated with this class of black hole.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.