2. Finite Black Holes Inside an Infinite Black Hole
The interior region of the Schwarzschild metric (Region II in
Figure 1) is described by the Schwarzschild metric:
Equation
1 is the interior metric and for the rest of the paper it is important to remember that when discussing the interior metric,
t is the spacelike coordinate and r is the timelike coordinate.
The interior metric describes the interior of a Black Hole. If we place a Black Hole inside the interior metric, the vacuum between the Black Hole and the surface of the shell of the interior metric is also a spherically symmetric vacuum. This can be trivially visualized in
Figure 2
We can see that the vacuum in
Figure 2 is spherically symmetric and therefore must also be described by the Schwarzschild metric.
The radial coordinate
r of the interior metric is timelike, so as
r goes from
u to 0, time moves forward. So the Black Hole at the center of
Figure 2 is at some
in the interior metric and moves toward
in that metric as time passes. A notable feature of the metric in equation
1 is the angular term
. This term is multiplied by
r which goes from
u to 0 as time passes. This means that as the Black Hole falls through time in this metric, it’s surface area will decrease proportionally to
r as a consequence of this angular term. At
, which is the curvature singularity of the metric, the Black Hole surface area will go to zero, and the Black Hole will no longer exist. It is as though the Black Hole gets squeezed out of existence at the singularity.
If we now imagine that the Black Hole is being orbited by some material, then the contraction of the
term will also cause those orbits to be squeezed closer to the surface of the Black Hole as time passes.
Figure 3 depicts the relative scale of the gravitational field around the Black Hole as it moves through time toward
in the interior metric.
According to the interior metric, the basis vectors get larger as r decreases, becoming infinite at . Therefore, the proper distance/time between t coordinates increases as the system falls to .
Consider
Figure 4 which depicts the curvature of the
t coordinates in the exterior metric near the surface of a Black Hole. The
t coordinate lines are the curved lines and they come from solving the metric for rest observers (
) and integrating to get the following equation:
Where each line corresponds to a fixed value of
t, with
being the flat line on the
r axis. Vertical worldlines on this coordinate chart are the worldlines of observers at rest and their height is the proper time elapsed. We can see that for a given
, less proper time passes for rest observers the closer they are to the horizon. The worldlines of observers falling from two different radii are also shown in
Figure 4.
We can conceptualize the t coordinate lines as analogous to isocontours on a contour chart, where represents the highest level and represents the lowest level. The trajectory of a falling observer follows the geodesic of shortest distance from the highest level to the lowest level, ensuring their worldline remains perpendicular to the t coordinate lines at every point. Consequently, the worldlines of all falling observers start vertically at , gradually curving to maintain orthogonality to the t coordinate lines at each point, and eventually becoming horizontal at , .
But if the Black Hole is in the interior metric, then the proper time between
t coordinate lines will increase as the system falls to
in the interior metric. This has the effect of shifting the gravitational field inward toward the horizon over time as depicted in
Figure 5
The solid
t-coordinate lines are the
t coordinate lines at some reference time
in the interior metric. The dotted lines are the
t-coordinate lines at some
such that those lines are separated by more proper time relative to the solid lines. As shown in
Figure 5, this increase in proper distance between coordinate lines shifts the location of a given
closer to the horizon. Since
is related to the acceleration a rest observer feels at a given distance from the horizon, this tells us that the acceleration field is also squeezed toward the horizon as the Black Hole falls toward
in the interior metric.
So while the and terms of the Black Hole system are contracted to a point, the t coordinate far from the Black Hole we placed in the interior metric becomes spacelike and its expansion represents an expansion of space. We can understand this by adding more Black Holes into the shell such that they are distributed homogeneously and isotropically in the infinite space t inside the shell, but separated enough that they do not interact with each other gravitationally. The space between those systems is a vacuum parameterized by the t coordinate of the interior metric.
The equation for a 2D hyperboloid surface embedded in three dimensions is given by:
For our purposes, we will be considering the special case where
, which gives the one and two sheeted hyperboloids of revolution. Next, we note the following relationship with regards to the Kruskal-Szekeres coordinates:
Equation 4 appears to be only for one dimension of space, but if we think of
X as a radius, then it can describe a 3D isotropic hyperboloid. So comparing to Equation 3, if we set
and
where
R is a radius of a circle in this example, we obtain an equation that matches the form of Equation
3 where :
Equation
5 describes 2D hyperboloid surfaces for a given
r where the interior metric has negative
. This means that the interior metric describes a 2-sheeted hyperboloid. Note that
Figure 1 is for constant
and
, meaning there exists identical diagrams for each 3D spherical direction.
We will for now focus on region II from
Figure 1, where region I captures the external metric and region II captures the interior metric. If we choose some constant value of
in the interior metric and plot Equation
5 for the interior metric, we get the surfaces shown in
Figure 6.
We see we have two separate sheets, but for the moment, we will only focus on the top sheet. The meaning of the bottom sheet will be discussed in
Section 4.
Light cones in
Figure 6 are oriented vertically and light travels on 45 degree lines. If we choose any point on the surface and project a past and future light cone from that point. We can move that point to the apex of the surface (at
) by hyperbolically rotating the spacetime until the point is at the apex. We can do this without changing anything in the spacetime because the hyperbolic rotation is a translation in
t, and
is Killing vector of the manifold. When the point is rotated to the apex, we see then that the light cone is symmetric relative to the surface left and right and into and out of the page. This symmetry means the spacelike foliations of the interior metric’s vacuum are isotropic and homogeneous.
This can be extended to three spatial dimensions by allowing
R to be the radius of a 3D sphere. In this formulation, we put ourselves at
and the circles on the surfaces in
Figure 6 will become spheres that are isotropic and homogeneous in space and inhomogeneous in time, which is consistent with the Cosmological Principle.
So the surface of
Figure 6 represents the vacuum of the interior metric with nothing (not even another Black Hole) inside of it. There are no intrinsic spacelike spherical features in this vacuum, and so on its own, it describes a homogeneous space that expands over time (this will be discussed in more detail in
Section 3). But when we place black holes in this spacetime, they create spacelike spherical regions in the vacuum that contract over time as has been discussed.
We can depict Black Holes inside the interior metric and better understand their contraction over time with
Figure 7.
Figure 7 is a modified picture of region II from the Kruskal-Szekeres coordinate chart in
Figure 1 with the dark hyperbolas represent the singularity at
, the 45 degree dashed lines represent the surface of the interior metric, and the hyperbolas between those are the interior vacuum at some
with three black holes shown as wells stretching out from this hyperbola. The undeformed hyperbola where the wells are is shown as a dotted line for reference.
So we see from the figure that the gravitational wells created by Black Holes can be understood as the spacelike hypersurface in the interior spacetime being locally stretched back to the surface of the interior spacetime. Since is a Killing vector of the spacetime, we can apply hyperbolic rotations to the hyperbola to make any of the Black Holes on the surface centered on the diagram (i.e. there is no difference between the three Black Holes in the figure because we can hyperbolically rotate any of them to the center of the diagram). The relative sizes of the wells are related to the relative Schwarzschild radii of each Black Hole.
The wells stretch out to the surface on the interior region because, as shown in Appendix A, the event horizon of the exterior metric can always be hyperbolically rotated to . So it is important to keep in mind that the tips of the wells of the Black Holes represent the event horizon of the exterior solution, not the singularity.
The left side of
Figure 7 shows the vacuum with three Black Holes at some time
and the right side shows the same surface at a later time
. As the surface moves up toward
, the wells close. This is the contraction of the gravitational field discussed earlier. As the surface moves to
, the wells close completely and the spacelike surface becomes completely flat and empty. So the contraction of the
and
terms of the internal metric lead to a contraction of the wells and the expansion of the
term results in the expansion of the space between the different wells.
A notable point here is that the entire surface, including the wells, represent an interior hypersurface at some
r. The meaning of this will be expanded on in
Section 3, but we should note that as we change the value
r of the hypersurface, the relative positions of the wells can change and new wells can be formed at different times (i.e. the hypersurface at some
may have no wells, whereas the same surface at some later time
can have a well on it if, for instance, a gravitational collapse occurred at some time in between). In fact, we can say that two gravitating systems will combine if they move together more quickly than the
t-vacuum between them expands.
Furthermore, we can think of gravitational wells of non-Black Holes, such as a star, as being indents in the hypersurface that do not reach back to the interior surface at a sharp point, those are just smooth, shallower dips in the surface.
It is interesting to think about the interplay of space and time from these gravitational wells. The surface without a Black Hole is perpendicular to the time dimension r in the interior metric. But the gravitational wells stretch that surface in the r direction. Thus, the r direction of the interior region gains spacelike characteristics in the gravitational wells because the spacelike surface gets deformed in the r direction. This is why the r coordinate is timelike in the interior vacuum and spacelike in the exterior vacuum. It also creates a connection between the ’up’ and ’down’ directions of gravity that come from the exterior metric, and ’future’ and ’past’ from the interior metric. In this model, ’up’ and ’future’ are the same direction on the manifold, where when we observe this direction from the exterior metric point of view, we see the direction as spacelike and when we observe it from the interior metric point of view, we see it as timelike. The same is true for the ’down’/’past’ direction.
We will explore what occurs at the event horizon of the gravitational wells in
Section 4, but first we will look at this model in the context of the cosmology of the Universe.