(urth) "been teaching literature for over 35 years"

Gerry Quinn gerry at bindweed.com
Mon Sep 9 06:56:02 PDT 2013



From: Jeffery Wilson
> On 9/9/2013 7:42 AM, Gerry Quinn wrote:
> > It doesn't matter (in engineering terms) whether stuff that reaches the
> > event horizon goes somewhere else or not (that's kind of the definition
> > of an event horizon).  But an accretion disk outside the Schwarzschild
> > radius is just standard dynamics for any super-condensed object.

> What force acts on the matter to prevent it from following the usual swarm 
> of elliptical orbits instead of the disk?

In a word, friction.  The matter would be gaseous in this case and particles 
could not swirl in independent orbits.  But even if it were composed of 
solid particles, they would soon collide, which would (1) heat the colliding 
particles (2) reduce their energy, and (3) set the colliding particles on 
closer trajectories than they were before.

- Gerry Quinn





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