hostility of other scientists, particularly Eddington, his former teacher and the leading authority on the structure of stars,
persuaded Chandrasekhar to abandon this line of work and turn instead to other problems in astronomy, such as the
motion of star clusters. However, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1983, it was, at least in part, for his early
work on the limiting mass of cold stars.
Chandrasekhar had shown that the exclusion principle could not halt the collapse of a star more massive than the
Chandrasekhar limit, but the problem of understanding what would happen to such a star, according to general
relativity, was first solved by a young American, Robert Oppenheimer, in 1939. His result, however, suggested that
there would be no observational consequences that could be detected by the telescopes of the day. Then World War II
intervened and Oppenheimer himself became closely involved in the atom bomb project. After the war the problem of
gravitational collapse was largely forgotten as most scientists became caught up in what happens on the scale of the
atom and its nucleus. In the 1960s, however, interest in the large-scale problems of astronomy and cosmology was
revived by a great increase in the number and range of astronomical observations brought about by the application of
modern technology. Oppenheimer’s work was then rediscovered and extended by a number of people.
The picture that we now have from Oppenheimer’s work is as follows. The gravitational field of the star changes the
paths of light rays in space-time from what they would have been had the star not been present. The light cones, which
indicate the paths followed in space and time by flashes of light emitted from their tips, are bent slightly inward near the
surface of the star. This can be seen in the bending of light from distant stars observed during an eclipse of the sun. As
the star contracts, the gravitational field at its surface gets stronger and the light cones get bent inward more. This
makes it more difficult for light from the star to escape, and the light appears dimmer and redder to an observer at a
distance. Eventually, when the star has shrunk to a certain critical radius, the gravitational field at the surface becomes
so strong that the light cones are bent inward so much that light can no longer escape Figure 6:1.
Figure 6:1
According to the theory of relativity, nothing can travel faster than light. Thus if light cannot escape, neither can anything
else; everything is dragged back by the gravitational field. So one has a set of events, a region of space-time, from
which it is not possible to escape to reach a distant observer. This region is what we now call a black hole. Its boundary
is called the event horizon and it coincides with the paths of light rays that just fail to escape from the black hole.
In order to understand what you would see if you were watching a star collapse to form a black hole, one has to
remember that in the theory of relativity there is no absolute time. Each observer has his own measure of time. The time
for someone on a star will be different from that for someone at a distance, because of the gravitational field of the star.
Suppose an intrepid astronaut on the surface of the collapsing star, collapsing inward with it, sent a signal every
second, according to his watch, to his spaceship orbiting about the star. At some time on his watch, say 11:00, the star
would shrink below the critical radius at which the gravitational field becomes so strong nothing can escape, and his
signals would no longer reach the spaceship. As 11:00 approached his companions watching from the spaceship would
find the intervals between successive signals from the astronaut getting longer and longer, but this effect would be very
small before 10:59:59. They would have to wait only very slightly more than a second between the astronaut’s 10:59:58
signal and the one that he sent when his watch read 10:59:59, but they would have to wait forever for the 11:00 signal.
The light waves emitted from the surface of the star between 10:59:59 and 11:00, by the astronaut’s watch, would be
spread out over an infinite period of time, as seen from the spaceship. The time interval between the arrival of
successive waves at the spaceship would get longer and longer, so the light from the star would appear redder and
redder and fainter and fainter. Eventually, the star would be so dim that it could no longer be seen from the spaceship:
all that would be left would be a black hole in space. The star would, however, continue to exert the same gravitational
force on the spaceship, which would continue to orbit the black hole. This scenario is not entirely realistic, however,
because of the following problem. Gravity gets weaker the farther you are from the star, so the gravitational force on our
intrepid astronaut’s feet would always be greater than the force on his head. This difference in the forces would stretch
our astronaut out like spaghetti or tear him apart before the star had contracted to the critical radius at which the event
horizon formed! However, we believe that there are much larger objects in the universe, like the central regions of
galaxies, that can also undergo gravitational collapse to produce black holes; an astronaut on one of these would not be
torn apart before the black hole formed. He would not, in fact, feel anything special as he reached the critical radius,
and could pass the point of no return without noticing it However, within just a few hours, as the region continued to
collapse, the difference in the gravitational forces on his head and his feet would become so strong that again it would
tear him apart.
The work that Roger Penrose and I did between 1965 and 1970 showed that, according to general relativity, there must
be a singularity of infinite density and space-time curvature within a black hole. This is rather like the big bang at the
beginning of time, only it would be an end of time for the collapsing body and the astronaut. At this singularity the laws
of science and our ability to predict the future would break down. However, any observer who remained outside the
black hole would not be affected by this failure of predictability, because neither light nor any other signal could reach
him from the singularity. This remarkable fact led Roger Penrose to propose the cosmic censorship hypothesis, which
might be paraphrased as “God abhors a naked singularity.” In other words, the singularities produced by gravitational
collapse occur only in places, like black holes, where they are decently hidden from outside view by an event horizon.
Strictly, this is what is known as the weak cosmic censorship hypothesis: it protects observers who remain outside the
black hole from the consequences of the breakdown of predictability that occurs at the singularity, but it does nothing at
all for the poor unfortunate astronaut who falls into the hole.
There are some solutions of the equations of general relativity in which it is possible for our astronaut to see a naked
singularity: he may be able to avoid hitting the singularity and instead fall through a "wormhole” and come out in another
region of the universe. This would offer great possibilities for travel in space and time, but unfortunately it seems that
these solutions may all be highly unstable; the least disturbance, such as the presence of an astronaut, may change
them so that the astronaut could not see the singularity until he hit it and his time came to an end. In other words, the
singularity would always lie in his future and never in his past. The strong version of the cosmic censorship hypothesis
states that in a realistic solution, the singularities would always lie either entirely in the future (like the singularities of
gravitational collapse) or entirely in the past (like the , big bang). I strongly believe in cosmic censorship so I bet Kip
Thorne and John Preskill of Cal Tech that it would always hold. I lost the bet on a technicality because examples were
produced of solutions with a singularity that was visible from a long way away. So I had to pay up, which according to
the terms of the bet meant I had to clothe their nakedness. But I can claim a moral victory. The naked singularities were
unstable: the least disturbance would cause them either to disappear or to be hidden behind an event horizon. So they
would not occur in realistic situations.
The event horizon, the boundary of the region of space-time from which it is not possible to escape, acts rather like a
one-way membrane around the black hole: objects, such as unwary astronauts, can fall through the event horizon into
the black hole, but nothing can ever get out of the black hole through the event horizon. (Remember that the event
horizon is the path in space-time of light that is trying to escape from the black hole, and nothing can travel faster than
light.) One could well say of the event horizon what the poet Dante said of the entrance to Hell: “All hope abandon, ye
who enter here.” Anything or anyone who falls through the event horizon will soon reach the region of infinite density
and the end of time.
General relativity predicts that heavy objects that are moving will cause the emission of gravitational waves, ripples in
the curvature of space that travel at the speed of light. These are similar to light waves, which are ripples of the
electromagnetic field, but they are much harder to detect. They can be observed by the very slight change in separation
they produce between neighboring freely moving objects. A number of detectors are being built in the United States,
Europe, and Japan that will measure displacements of one part in a thousand million million million (1 with twenty-one
zeros after it), or less than the nucleus of an atom over a distance of ten miles.
Like light, gravitational waves carry energy away from the objects that emit them. One would therefore expect a system
of massive objects to settle down eventually to a stationary state, because the energy in any movement would be
carried away by the emission of gravitational waves. (It is rather like dropping a cork into water: at first it bobs up and
down a great deal, but as the ripples carry away its energy, it eventually settles down to a stationary state.) For
example, the movement of the earth in its orbit round the sun produces gravitational waves. The effect of the energy
loss will be to change the orbit of the earth so that gradually it gets nearer and nearer to the sun, eventually collides with
it, and settles down to a stationary state. The rate of energy loss in the case of the earth and the sun is very low – about
enough to run a small electric heater. This means it will take about a thousand million million million million years for the
earth to run into the sun, so there’s no immediate cause for worry! The change in the orbit of the earth is too slow to be
observed, but this same effect has been observed over the past few years occurring in the system called PSR 1913 +
16 (PSR stands for “pulsar,” a special type of neutron star that emits regular pulses of radio waves). This system
contains two neutron stars orbiting each other, and the energy they are losing by the emission of gravitational waves is
causing them to spiral in toward each other. This confirmation of general relativity won J. H. Taylor and R. A. Hulse the
Nobel Prize in 1993. It will take about three hundred million . years for them to collide. Just before they do, they will be
orbiting so fast that they will emit enough gravitational waves for detectors like LIGO to pick up.
During the gravitational collapse of a star to form a black hole, the movements would be much more rapid, so the rate at
which energy is carried away would be much higher. It would therefore not be too long ' before it settled down to a
stationary state. What would this final stage look like? One might suppose that it would depend on all the complex
features of the star from which it had formed – not only its mass and rate of rotation, but also the different densities of
various parts of the star, and the complicated movements of the gases within the star. And if black holes were as varied
as the objects that collapsed to form them, it might be very difficult to make any predictions about black holes in
general.
In 1967, however, the study of black holes was revolutionized by Werner Israel, a Canadian scientist (who was born in
Berlin, brought up in South Africa, and took his doctoral degree in Ireland). Israel showed that, according to general
relativity, non-rotating black holes must be very simple; they were perfectly spherical, their size depended only on their
mass, and any two such black holes with the same mass were identical. They could, in fact, be described by a
particular solution of Einstein’s equations that had been known since 1917, found by Karl Schwarzschild shortly after
the discovery of general relativity. At first many people, including Israel himself, argued that since black holes had to be
perfectly spherical, a black hole could only form from the collapse of a perfectly spherical object. Any real star – which
would never be perfectly spherical – could therefore only collapse to form a naked singularity.
There was, however, a different interpretation of Israel’s result, which was advocated by Roger Penrose and John
Wheeler in particular. They argued that the rapid movements involved in a star’s collapse would mean that the
gravitational waves it gave off would make it ever more spherical, and by the time it had settled down to a stationary
state, it would be precisely spherical. According to this view, any non-rotating star, however complicated its shape and
internal structure, would end up after gravitational collapse as a perfectly spherical black hole, whose size would
depend only on its mass. Further calculations supported this view, and it soon came to be adopted generally.
Israel’s result dealt with the case of black holes formed from non-rotating bodies only. In 1963, Roy Kerr, a New
Zealander, found a set of solutions of the equations of general relativity that described rotating black holes. These
“Kerr” black holes rotate at a constant rate, their size and shape depending only on their mass and rate of rotation. If the
rotation is zero, the black hole is perfectly round and the solution is identical to the Schwarzschild solution. If the
