Black Shell Formation
The gravitational collapse of a star into a black shell starts when the outward flow of heat from nuclear reactions in it can no longer overcome the inward pull of gravity. In the collapse, stellar material accelerates inwards along radii reaching the star’s center, compressing the infalling mass and raising its internal pressure and temperature.
The rising gravitational pressure drives star material into a series of different physical states. The first conversion is the stripping of electrons orbiting around the nuclei of individual atoms, packing the nuclei close together in a sea of electrons. Low-mass stars whose gravity can compress them no further become white dwarf stars at this stage. In more massive stars, the next change strips electrons from the atomic nuclei, converting protons into neutrons. A neutron star is born. This is the fate of stars with a mass below about 1.7 times that of the sun.
Kip Thorne has shown that before this mass is reached, the infalling material has become spherically symmetrical (8).To stabilize this symmetry, spacetime quanta holding the inwardly accelerating particles become arranged uniformly in a series of concentric shells of nested spheroids, with the diameter and time interval of each spacetime quantum shrinking in the direction of the star’s radial gravitational field.
As the collapse continues beyond neutron star production, the nuclei within the quanta go through further changes of state. These are occurring at significant fractions of the speed light, taking place in the final fraction of a second, too fast to be observed telescopically. In some cases, the further changes in state that might occur have been observed at the highest energies achieved in laboratory particle accelerators.
Beyond the neutron star state, the compression force begins to smash each neutron into the three or more quarks that orbit within a neutron’s 10-16 m diameter volume. The reactions involving quarks after this are a matter for speculation. As compression energy continues to rise, it becomes capable of creating heavier and heavier members of the quark family. These have shorter and shorter lifetimes speeding up the rate at which interactions are occurring and recurring. Top quarks may be produced that decay within 10-25 s.
The various decay products at different stages of compression contain copious numbers of photons that are recycled though other reactions. When compression stops increasing, the mass of the original star has been crushed entirely into photons, as indicated by the calculation below.
Photons are bosons, which means they easily group together and share the same state in the same quantum. Matter particles which make up a large part of the collapsing star are fermions, which do not share the same state: only one can occupy a quantum at a given time. The calculation assumes the photons are acting like fermions instead of boson, which may involve anyon particles able to act as bosons or fermions. Nakamura’s team (9) has shown these particles change from fermions to bosons on a two-dimensional atomic surface comparable to that of the terminal quantum shell. It is possible that photons convert to fermions in a comparable way on a two-dimensional quantum disk.
At the leading face of a concentric collapsing series of shells, an initial group of photons arrives in a central shell shrunk to the point where each quantum has lost one radial dimension and forms a two-dimensional circular disk. The shell of quanta becomes a surface with an escape velocity equal to the speed of light.
When this occurs, the leading shell is at the center of infalling population of concentric quantum shells. Ahead of the terminal disk there are no more shells, only a sphere of bulk energy arriving at the star center via gaps between the quantum disks. As it has no spacetime dimensions, it cannot collapse.
Assembling the Shell
At its formation into a spherical shell of fully flattened disks, the leading face of the infalling shells comes to a violent halt, sending a shock wave back to the exterior surface, initializing a supernova. As incoming quanta continue to arrive and lose their radial dimension, they meet this unyielding shell. The only direction they can continue to move as they form true disks is by their incorporation into the terminal shell that must expand outward radially and circumferentially. This it does like a swirling tornado, increasing the volume of the space available to the rapidly increasing population of quantum disks and their photons
Driving the swirl is the circumferential rotation of the gravitational field of the spinning remnant. Its spin, like that of a skater with arms drawn in, is accelerating in response to the collapsing star’s reduced circumference. Meeting the requirement to conserve angular momentum, the spin will speed up to near the speed of light when gravity crushes a star 10 times the mass of the sun into to a 185 km circummference.
General relativity shows the result is spacetime itself is dragged around by the field in a tornado-like motion, highest at the center and decreasing radially outwards (10). As this occurs, the dominant gravitational pull of the star, which is radial, rips up the multiple shells, allowing them to rearrange their quanta into a stable configuration of the lowest energy. The remanent of the star becomes a single shell with one photon per quantum disk, interfacing at the newly forming event horizon with bulk energy.
The photons cannot pass through the horizon because they are moving at the speed of light in circular orbits around a sphere of bulk energy. The event horizon of the new black star is the mathematical boundary where information about events within the star can no longer be detected. It is the zero-thickness membrane interface between two-dimensional spacetime quanta and dimensionless bulk energy.
The new black shell has the same mass and spin as the initial star (11). It is defined simply by its mass, spin, and electric charge. The charge will be cancelled out by capture of particles of opposite polarity. Dissipative processes may eventually remove the spin, leaving an object that is defined by its mass alone.
Black Shell Growth
After a black shell has formed, most material reaching it becomes captured by an accretion disk rotating around it. This converts arriving material into the state required to access the shell surface. Incoming material from local clouds of gas or stars rarely approache in a radial direction. So the intense gravitation field of the black star draws the material into tight planetary orbits around an object that may be trillions of times smaller than the original star. Mutual gravitation and collisions merge the arrival orbits of different sources into a the orbit of a single accretion disk.
As the disk population increases, the rate and intensity of collisions grows, producing a range of high-energy particles at rates beyond those achieved in laboratory accelerators. Particle fusion reactions within the disk release energy some 40 times more efficiently than the Sun’s fusion processes. These and other high-energy reactions produce copious streams of photons.
Some photons transfer to a stable orbit nearer the dark star. But small perturbations disturb the stability of this light ring and release streams of photons back to the accretion disk or forward to the dark star. Those reaching the star enter via circular orbits that shrink into and expand the star surface. The accretion disk and the photon ring are a photon production line that feeds the black shell.
Black Shell Temperature
How do we know the ultimate product of gravitational collapse of a star is the conversion of all of the energy and matter in the star into photons? This is unexpected because matter is primarily fermions whereas photons, like other force-carrying particles, are bosons. These two categories of elementary particles have opposite properties and conversion of one into the other has in the past been considered impossible.
Fermions have mass and two of them cannot occupy the same state. Which means they cannot occupy the same spacetime quantum. Bosons have no mass, carrying energy instead, and numbers of them can share a single state and therefore a single quantum. The two types of particle also have different spins.
The clue for the transformation is that reconciliation of opposing properties like these has been demonstrated recently on two dimensional surfaces with particles called anyons. The properties of particles on such surfaces differ from those of the same particles in a three-dimensional volume. And it is two-dimensional surfaces that rule at the interface between bulk energy and spaceetime contents in quantized spacetime.
So discover the properties of particle in a black shell and calculate what sort of particle it is.
Assume the simplest case, and derive the properties of a non-spinning black shell with no electric charge that is perfectly symmetrical. Assume each spacetime quantum is occupied by one elementary particle at the temperature of the shell. Apart from small random perturbations in orbits, the particles bring no distinguishing feature to the black shell, except the mass and the average temperature of the shell.
In the calculating this temperature I assume there is no net circumferential field distorting the circular quantum disks and that quanta are in a random array in which the average area required by each quantum is the minimum square touching a quantum disk at four points on its periphery (the Planck length squared).
Dividing the shell area by the extended quantum area (the Planck area) gives the number of quanta and so the number of particles in the shell. The large difference between the extended quantum area and the black shell area permits the assumption that the shell is randomly packed with no discernable patter, as if on a plane surface.
Dividing the shell mass by the number of quanta provides the mass of each particle. In a black shell with a mass five times that of the sun, the particle within each quantum has an energy equivalent to a mass of 3.79 x 10-46 kg. Compared with this, a 1.1 eV neutrino one millionth the mass of an electron has a mass of 1.78 x 10-36 kg. As the quantum particle is ten orders of magnitude smaller than this, I assume it to be a photon with a temperature of 4.9 x 10-8 K, rather than suggest it is an undiscovered new particle whose mass falls as the black star’s rises. The calculation giving this number follows.
12/24/2022