Talk:Black hole

Article Checklist for "Black hole"

Workgroup category or categories	Astronomy Workgroup [Categories OK]
Article status	Developing article: beyond a stub, but incomplete
Underlinked article?	No
Basic cleanup done?	Yes
Checklist last edited by	David Martin 09:45, 16 May 2007 (CDT)

To learn how to fill out this checklist, please see CZ:The Article Checklist.

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Moving forward

I appreciate the cleanup of the article I wrote, but I have a couple of thoughts for future development of this article:

• Given the conjectured existence of "quantum black holes", wouldn't it be better to lead with the defining characteristic of black holes - that their escape velocity is greater than c (and then define the event horizon) before introducing one of the ways in which black holes are created?
• A distinction between rotating and non-rotating black holes is introduced at the beginning, but nothing is made of it. Clearly, the subject is worth a paragraph or five as this article is expanded, but I don't know that mentioning it in the first paragraph is worthwhile, unless some major consequence of the difference is also mentioned.
• The rewrite of the Hawking radiation paragraph, while generally an improvement, has taken my clumsy attempt to explain Hawking radiation (the name of which I'd forgotten), and left the paragraph with a better exposition, but lacking an explanation of the cause of Hawking radiation. Perhaps the first two sentences would read better something like:

According to quantum mechanics, the location of the matter within a black hole is uncertain. As a result, black holes can "leak" a very small amount of mass, a phenomenon called Hawking radiation.

• I introduced the concept of black holes "evaporating", but left out parts of the explanation - that black holes lose mass through Hawking radiation, and eventually, in theory, will disappear completely. This needs better exposition in the article. This may also be a good place to introduce quantum black holes, as those are the only ones which will actually evaporate in a reasonable amount of time (less than the age of the universe).