Answer my science question

I was more referring to when they are shown like this, which is clearly wrong.

It's not wrong. What is shown there is the accretion disc which surrounds the black hole. It is formed by debris and dust being pulled in towards the black hole and it forms a flattened disc. Same way as Saturn's rings are flattened, same way as the plane of our solar system is flattened, same as the plane of the Galaxy is flattened.
 
This should be very interesting unless somebody has already linked it -

Event Horizon Telescope ready to image black hole

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-38937141

This is very exciting news.

We have multiple modules at each telescope and we have numerous telescopes in the array. So, ultimately, we're talking about 10,000 laptops of data."

It is in Haystack's correlator computer that the synthesis will begin.

Some very smart imaging algorithms have had to be developed to make sense of the EHT's observations, but it will not be a quick result.

It could be the end of the year, perhaps the start of 2018, before the team releases an image in public.

Roll on 2018 !
 
Not so. At the moment of the Big Bang, science tells us that all matter in the Universe was condensed into a space smaller than an atom. That is much more dense than a black hole or neutron star.
Again its still only a theory (the best one we have) but it is completely unknown how such a thing happened or how matter could possibly act in such a way - or if it was even matter at that point.
 
Again its still only a theory.

You don't seem to understand what scientists mean when they use the word 'Theory'. They don't mean the layman's interpretation of a stab in the dark or a best guess. They mean :

A scientific theory is a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world, based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment. Such fact-supported theories are not "guesses" but reliable accounts of the real world.
 
It's not wrong. What is shown there is the accretion disc which surrounds the black hole. It is formed by debris and dust being pulled in towards the black hole and it forms a flattened disc. Same way as Saturn's rings are flattened, same way as the plane of our solar system is flattened, same as the plane of the Galaxy is flattened.

Sorry you're not getting what I'm saying. The black centre of the black hole, the event horizon, would not look oval shaped when viewed from an angle. It would look like a perfect circle from any angle.
 
The black centre of the black hole, the event horizon...

The centre of a Black Hole is called a Singularity. Time stands still at the point of a Singularity. The Event Horizon is the outer rim of a Black Hole. The point at which nothing can escape once it crosses it, not even light. You are right though that a Black Hole is a sphere.
 
Looks like Angilion has pretty much answered this one but I'll add my comments.

See I understand what everyone is saying, i understand the science of event horizons, accretion discs etc. What I was curious to know is why scientist make the leap from the matter/particles being clumped together through extreme mavity to what is seemingly the common conception of a tear in space. Is there a theoretical reason behind that or is it just meer speculation. If the math breaks down inside a black hole why assume something that seems illogical and unrelated to what we normally observe in reality.
What seems more logical to me is that the huge amount of mass is ripped apart and crushed into something so dense, without the large distances between nucleus and particles that even after consuming thousands of stars it would still only be the size of a pea. However it would still have shape and size. You just would never be able to see it.

Scientists don't think of black holes as 'a tear in space'. As others have written, the best we can currently say with certainty is that black holes are regions of extremely strong mavity such that even light cannot escape.

The reason for this is that physics develops from experimental and theoretical work. Black holes are (almost) impossible to see directly (because they don't emit anything) so the first we knew about them was from the theoretical work of Einstein and others.

More recently the experiments (using telescopes and other detectors) have caught up and support the existence of black holes indirectly, e.g. by detecting gravitational waves from colliding black holes (LIGO), tracking the movement of stars in our galaxy, detecting high energy emissions, etc.

So black holes probably exist, at least insofar as the event horizon, and since it's physically impossible to 'dig any deeper' (because no practical information can get out of a black hole) that's pretty much the end of it until the theoretical work develops further.

The reason for this is that (unfortunately) General Relativity says that the middle of a black hole is a singularity, which most physicists think is unlikely because there are probably quantum effects we don't yet know about that stop this happening.

So it's not that 'the math breaks down' - GR is totally certain in telling us there is a point of infinite density at the middle - but this is unsatisfactory, so we think GR just isn't the right tool for the job. We need Quantum mavity for that, which is a major research topic.

Sorry you're not getting what I'm saying. The black centre of the black hole, the event horizon, would not look oval shaped when viewed from an angle. It would look like a perfect circle from any angle.

Yes, but you mean sphere (they're 3D after all). And actually it should be possible to get rotating black holes which aren't spherical, but they quickly stop spinning and become regular ones.
 
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You don't seem to understand what scientists mean when they use the word 'Theory'. They don't mean the layman's interpretation of a stab in the dark or a best guess. They mean :

i'm well aware of what scientists mean, i am one.
Its a good theory but much of it is still unknown (and will likely stay unknown).
The thing i say most often is 'i don't know' simply because the evidence is not there to make a satisfactory conclusion.
The centre of a black hole is a mystery (as is the mechanism of the big bang) and any physicist who claims otherwise is a liar/idiot.
 
Yes, but you mean sphere (they're 3D after all). And actually it should be possible to get rotating black holes which aren't spherical, but they quickly stop spinning and become regular ones.

On what basis would a rotating black hole not have a perfectly spherical event horizon? The singularity at its centre is a point with no size, so that can't be any other shape. Meaning the event horizon should be uniform? Can something with zero size rotate in the first place - can a singularity rotate?
 
On what basis would a rotating black hole not have a perfectly spherical event horizon? The singularity at its centre is a point with no size, so that can't be any other shape. Meaning the event horizon should be uniform? Can something with zero size rotate in the first place - can a singularity rotate?

How can a singularity merg with another blackhole. Since it's infinitely dense, how does it even move. Surely by definition it would not have anything strong enough to actually cause it to orbit that object and how would two infinitely dense things attract each other unless they weren't infinitely dense.
 
On what basis would a rotating black hole not have a perfectly spherical event horizon? The singularity at its centre is a point with no size, so that can't be any other shape. Meaning the event horizon should be uniform? Can something with zero size rotate in the first place - can a singularity rotate?

When the star has angular momentum, it turns into a black hole with angular momentum. The sphere becomes spheroidal (squashed, like a rugby ball).

How can a singularity merg with another blackhole. Since it's infinitely dense, how does it even move. Surely by definition it would not have anything strong enough to actually cause it to orbit that object and how would two infinitely dense things attract each other unless they weren't infinitely dense.

You're confusing infinitely dense with infinite mass. A singularity would still have a finite mass, based on the mass of the star that it was before. As long as the remnant is at least a few solar masses it can become a black hole, up to supermassive black holes of 10,000+ solar masses. A lot - but not infinite.
 
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Probably social sciences... Or even worse biology ;)

To be honest I don't believe him. In post 46 he said "It's only a theory". No true scientist would EVER say that because they understand that a theory in science is the highest level of proof of a phenomenon there is. It's the graduation point of observed, repeatedly tested facts that there is. mavity is explained by a theory, as is Evolution and Germ theory etc. These are not disputed by 99% of scientists. There is a clear consensus that they are accurate to the best of our current knowledge. However, unlike religious dogma, scientific theories are open to new evidence should it arise. This is what makes science our best tool for understanding nature and natural processes.
 
Not so. At the moment of the Big Bang, science tells us that all matter in the Universe was condensed into a space smaller than an atom. That is much more dense than a black hole or neutron star.

At the moment of the "big bang", science tells us nothing at all. Science doesn't yet cover it. Scientific knowledge starts a small period of time after the "big bang". Science also tells us that matter couldn't have existed in the very early universe. Science also tells us that matter denser than a neutron star can't exist. Maybe something did exist that was denser, but it wasn't matter. Maybe something still exists that it denser, but it still isn't matter. Science also tells us that the density of a black hole is infinite. I'm not enough of a mathematician to know if it's possible to have an infinity that's more infinite than an infinity, so I can't say if a density much higher than infinite density is possible. Something with infinite density isn't matter, though. It's...something else. Which, I suppose, raises the question of the definition of "matter". I suppose it would be possible to call anything "matter" even if it isn't made of the same stuff as what's called "matter" now. Just change the definition of "matter".
 
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