Even though it’s just a gravitational field, a black hole—like the supermassive giant shown in this artist’s conception—has a measure of disorder known as entropy.Fifty years ago, famed physicist Stephen Hawking wrote down an equation that predicts that a black hole has entropy, an attribute typically associated with the disordered jumbling of atoms and molecules in material.
However, a black hole is not a material object—it’s the gravitational field left behind when a massive star collapses. Within a certain distance of the point, gravity grows so strong not even light can escape. That distance defines the black hole’s spherical event horizon. In the mid-1970s, Hawking and theorist Jacob Bekenstein independently argued that a black hole should possess an entropy proportional to the area of its event horizon.
In principle, physicists ought to be able to start with Boltzmann’s definition of entropy, count a black hole’s microstates, and arrive at the Bekenstein-Hawking formula. So far, they’ve been able to do that only for unrealistic black holes using speculative string theory—which assumes every fundamental particle is a tiny string or multidimensional “brane.”
Balasubramanian and colleagues say they have come up with a surprisingly simple way to count them. They imagine a spherical shell of dust of a given radius and mass lurking behind the event horizon and distorting spacetime there. Its gravity creates a microstate for the black hole. The scientists can then create infinitely many microstates by varying the shell’s mass and radius.
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