Dec 07 2011

Black Hole Entropy

Published by at 8:10 am under Astrophysics

For those of us who are not anywhere close to being experts on black holes, we can still use our imaginations and think about such things when news comes up.  Evidently, two more super massive black holes, said to be billions of times more massive than the sun, have been found [1].

As far as black holes being black, it is because light entering does not escape them.  Within black holes, and for great distances without, not only would extremely intense magnetic fields change the direction of light travel, it may be that black holes are able to absorb a very high percentage of all incoming electromagnetic energy, utilizing it to maintain and increase structure.  We know from Griffiths and others that “magnetic forces do no work” [2], therefore the energy required to do the work to maintain all aspects of a black hole must come from internal currents and absorbed energy from outside.

If permitted, we can imagine a black hole as a lattice made up of neutron stars.  This does not mean that all neutron stars are the same size, or that all black hole lattices are built the same way.  Each black hole ‘crystal’ structure may be unique.  Spectral distribution of available incoming electromagnetic energy and the sum total of this energy over a period of time are two factors that may come into play.  Most of the electromagnetic energy coming into a black hole at the center of a galaxy cannot escape out the other side, which would contribute to the accelerated expansion of the galaxy.  Entropy may be decreasing for a time within a black hole, seemingly violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics, though the entropy of the entire galaxy, including the black hole, would be increasing.

It may be that as a black hole is concerned, there is very little gravity acting on objects outside the black hole, or none at all.

 

[1] http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2011/12/two-largest-black-holes-in-universe-discovered/

[2] Griffiths, David J., Introduction to Electrodynamics, Third Edition, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1999, pg 236

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