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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

But there pretty clearly is a gravitational field at r > 1. If that field is made up of gravitons, and a graviton can't escape from the mass to outside r = 1, then what is the source of the gravitons that compose the field at r > 1? If they don't originate at the mass, then... what?

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The manifold is well-behaved and continuous at r=1, and mass is one of the few characteristics a black hole has other than spin and charge. Gravitons from within the event horizon won’t escape, but the event horizon itself can be thought of as the entire black hole (for everything outside of the black hole).

This discussion might help where my ability to answer your excellent question is failing: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/937/how-does-gra...

Thank you for that link - it was very helpful. Summarizing:

The same problem would exist for the electric field from a charged black hole. However, static fields don't need propagating photons to establish them, so you don't have to get photons from inside the black hole in order for the electric field to be established outside.

The same would be true of gravitons. But one respondent indicated that general relativity can't do a second quantization like electromagnetism, and therefore gravitons are... suspect? Impossible? Not proven? It wasn't clear to me how strongly to take that statement.

I also saw that stackx discussion when I asked the question and Google'd it. But I was surprised by the fact that while I'd seen in social media, QA, etc this question had been asked before, I was looking for something of a longer or more authoritative source that was accessible to people outside of academic study.

I think the downvote brigaiding on this thread is coming from a particular set of users.

I noticed my karma is jumping down in waves. Unrelated comments are all being downvoted at the same time, suggesting unlikely coincidence or that some users are clicking on my profile and going through downvoting all the comments.

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