Friday, September 22, 2023 at 12:15 pm

JILA Foothills Room

Tyler McMacken, JILA / CU Boulder Physics Dept.

"Why you should care about what happens inside black holes"

Abstract:

The current best models of astrophysical black holes to test predictions of general relativity against observations from the EHT and the LIGO/VIRGO/KAGRA collaborations have a problem. The Kerr metric used to describe the spacetime geometry for these models is well-behaved outside of the event horizon, but inside the black hole, the metric makes wildly unrealistic predictions and furthermore is unstable to perturbations from both classical and quantum sources of accretion. In this talk, I will describe some of the work I have done throughout my PhD to explore this instability and how it might appear when ray-traced from the perspective of an in-falling observer. Along the way, we will explore what potentially observable consequences might arise when both the exterior and interior regions of a black hole are included in a unified semi-classical model.

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