Friday 7 October 2011

What is the temperature inside a Black Hole?

Temperature of a black hole is determined by 'black body radiation temperature' of radiation which comes from it (if something is hot enough to give off bright blue light,it is hotter than something that is merely a dim red hot.) For black holes the mass of Sun, radiation emitted from it is so weak and so cool that temperature is only one-millionth of a degree above absolute zero. some black holes are thought to weigh a billion times as much as the Sun and they would be a billion times colder, far colder than what scientists have achieved on Earth.
Even though these things are very cold, they can be surrounded by very hot material. As they pull gas and stars down into their gravity wells, material rubs against itself at a good fraction of speed of light. this heats it up to hundreds of millions of degrees. Radiation from this hot, in-falling material is what high-energy astronomers study.
A black hole behaves as though its horizon has a temperature and that temperature is inversely proportional to the hole's mass: T = (6 x 10^-8)M. Here M is in units of solar mass (2 x 1033 grams). Temperature is in degrees Kelvin.
This means that a hole recently formed by gravitational collapse of a star (which has to have a mass larger than about 2 suns) has a temperature less than 3 x 10^-8 centigrade above absolute zero which is very cold.
Mass with a finite temperature radiated energy. Anything which radiates energy is also losing mass.As black hole loses mass, emission of energy from black hole increases and its temperature increases and thus rate of mass loss increases.As mass of black hole gets small,one has unstable 'runaway effect'. Black hole gets hotter and hotter which causes M to decrease rapidly.When the hole is reduced to a fraction of the size of an atomic nucleus, it will be trillions of degrees. Hole will burn up and disappear. Lifetime of a black hole is greater than age of the universe.

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