Hot spaghetti: Viscous gravitational collapse

We explore the fate of matter falling into a macroscopic Schwarzschild black hole for the simplified case of a radially collapsing thin spherical shell for which the back reaction of the geometry can be neglected. We treat the internal dynamics of the in-falling matter in the framework of viscous relativistic hydrodynamics and calculate how the internal temperature of the collapsing matter evolves as it falls toward the Schwarzschild singularity. We find that viscous hydrodynamics fails when either the dissipative radial pressure exceeds the thermal pressure and the total radial pressure becomes negative, or the time scale of variation of the tidal forces acting on the collapsing matter becomes shorter than the characteristic hydrodynamic response time.

Duke Scholars

Author Berndt Mueller Physics