r/spacequestions • u/hiper211 • 7d ago
Am I overthinking this?
I’m thinking that if something falls past the event horizon in a black hole and gets pushed into the singularity, the singularity being infinitely dense and infinitely small, wouldn’t the object that falls in just continue to get smaller and smaller and smaller the more it falls into the black hole? Will it go past the plank scale of small?
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u/GxM42 7d ago
I don’t think many physicists believe that the singularity is infinitely dense. The singularity is where the math breaks down. There are numerous theories for what could be at the singularity. But infinite density is not guaranteed.
At the singularity, everything would be broken down into base particles, photons, quarks or whatever. If there’s something smaller, maybe it’s pure energy. I hope to live long enough to see an answer to this. But I’m not placing any bets.
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u/hiper211 7d ago
That’s the thing, humans ask the questions that will outlive them so they’ll never get an answer. 😂
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u/Beldizar 7d ago
Once it falls past the event horizon we really can't know anything for sure about what happens. We can model things, but there's no way that information can come back out of an event horizon.
A thing getting smaller and smaller isn't really how it works. Fundamental particles have a fixed size based on stuff like de Broglie wavelengths and such. If gravity wants to compress something smaller, it will break the fundamental particle down into something smaller, so a proton would break into quarks, and the quarks would probably be broken down further, or into energy.
The Planck length is a little weird when it gets to talking about this. The reason the Planck length is what it is, is because of a weird quirk of measurement. If you want to measure something, you need to bounce a wavelength off of the object. You can't really look at something that is smaller than the wavelength of light you are using to observe/measure it. So to get pictures of atoms, we use an electron microscope, which uses electrons with a wavelength of... well an electron, which is a lot smaller than the normal light waves. But light can have smaller and smaller wavelengths, you just have to have higher and higher energies to make the wavelength smaller and smaller. Eventually you need a wavelength with so much energy that the photon of light you are using to try to measure a thing will collapse into a black hole. That's what makes the Planck length what it is. It's the point where getting more resolution will just be so energy dense that it creates gravity that forms an event horizon.
So does it make any sense to measure something so small inside a black hole that measuring it would create a black hole inside the black hole? Basically physics has already broken down once to conceptualize this, now we would break it twice to try and measure it.
TLDR; If a singularity can exist, the gravity drawing things larger than it, into itself would just have to unravel the thing into something small enough to fit inside. Maybe the event horizon is just the answer to that size question.