> Evaporation accelerates until the cluster basically explodes
This sounds very much like what happens at the end of a black hole's lifetime as it evaporates by Hawking radiation. Any chance that's a real connection?
This sounds very much like what happens at the end of a black hole's lifetime as it evaporates by Hawking radiation. Any chance that's a real connection?
As gravitational systems lose energy, the "temperature" of the ensemble of particles goes up. (I.e. objects with smaller orbits have higher velocities.)
It is probably not exactly an accident that this relationship holds for blackholes as well: the hawking radiation formulas suggest a larger and larger temperature for blackholes with smaller and smaller event horizons. The hawking radiation stuff is built upon entropy / temperature relationships so I think there is actually some kind of connection there.
There might even be something baked into the energy conditions / bianchi identities of GR that is manifesting in that way, but I'm speculating.
Hm, yes, the Hawking quanta originate outside the event horizon, and not very nearby outside either (Giddings 2015 <https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.08221>, Unruh "Dumb Holes" 2007 <http://pos.sissa.it/cgi-bin/reader/conf.cgi?confid=43>).
However it's best to think of "the black hole" as the entire spacetime (in Hawking's 1974 treatment and similar; or alternatively out to somewhere in the asymptotic flatness), in which there are two regions without a horizon, one to the past of the event horizon formation, and one to the future of final evaporation.
What goes into the horizon doesn't stay in, therefore what happens inside is part of the picture (and has been speculated about for fifty years! Fifty!)
You're probably right, I appreciate your frankness. :D I'll start with trying to wrap my head around negative heat capacity.