# Blackholes and gravitons **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [March 20, 2010, 1:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blackholes-and-gravitons/533129 "2010-03-20T13:23:54Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Grey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/b782af/32.png) [@Grey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grey)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2010, 1:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blackholes-and-gravitons/533129/1 "2010-03-20T13:23:54Z")
It just occurred to me…if nothing can escape a blackhole’s event horizon then how would gravitons mediate the singularity’s gravity? The mass resides in a singularity and so any gravitons would have to travel past the event horizon. Since photon’s can’t do that why could gravitons? My only guess is that the emitted gravitons are analogous to the virtual particles created/destroyed at the Schwarzschild radius. But does that even make sense? Wouldn’t that mean there is such a thing as an anti-graviton? ---
**Author:** ![Nametag](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/nametag/32/406_2.png) [@Nametag](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nametag)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2010, 4:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blackholes-and-gravitons/533129/2 "2010-03-20T16:16:58Z")
Gravitons, like photons, would presumably be anti-particles themselves. Yes, virtual particle creation would be the most likely mechanism. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2010, 5:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blackholes-and-gravitons/533129/3 "2010-03-20T17:42:16Z")
The gravitons (and photons) involved in mediating a force are virtual. Without going into too much detail, the rules are different for virtual particles. Incidentally, a black hole can also have a charge, in which case it can exert an electrical force on its surroundings as well as a gravitational one. The virtual photons don’t have any more trouble with this than the virtual gravitons do. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2010, 6:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blackholes-and-gravitons/533129/4 "2010-03-20T18:13:30Z")
A simpler way to look at it is that for the gravitons to be affected by the event horizon, they’d have to feel, or react to, the gravitational force which causes the event horizon. It wouldn’t make much sense for a carrier particle to react to the force it was carrying. You’d get an evil circularity there. ---
**Author:** ![MeDrewNotYou](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/838e76/32.png) [@MeDrewNotYou](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MeDrewNotYou)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2010, 7:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blackholes-and-gravitons/533129/5 "2010-03-20T19:04:25Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#): > > A simpler way to look at it is that for the gravitons to be affected by the event horizon, they’d have to feel, or react to, the gravitational force which causes the event horizon. > > It wouldn’t make much sense for a carrier particle to react to the force it was carrying. **You’d get an evil circularity there.** Black holes are the devil’s trash compactors! ---
**Author:** ![JWT\_Kottekoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/3ec8ea/32.png) [@JWT\_Kottekoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JWT_Kottekoe)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2010, 7:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blackholes-and-gravitons/533129/6 "2010-03-20T19:05:37Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#): > > You’d get an evil circularity there. Evil circularities exist. That is what makes gravity nonlinear. Another example is the strong force, which affects quarks or any other particle with color charge. The carrier of this force is the gluon. The evil gluons are themselves colored, which is part of what makes quantum chromodynamics so complicated. There are bound states of gluons called “glue balls”. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2010, 9:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blackholes-and-gravitons/533129/7 "2010-03-20T21:11:31Z")
> [@](#): > > There are bound states of gluons called “glue balls”. There are _speculated to be_ bound states of gluons called glue balls. Nobody’s ever detected them yet, and nobody has a good enough model of the color force to even give a firm theoretical prediction of them. ---
**Author:** ![Grey](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/b782af/32.png) [@Grey](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grey)\ **Post date:** [March 20, 2010, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blackholes-and-gravitons/533129/8 "2010-03-20T21:39:20Z")
So gravitons originating from the singularity don’t have to obey causality? It seems if they can escape through the event horizon then they must be moving faster than light within the Schwarzschild radius and then meet some boundary condition that drops them down to c. Or did I not understand and the gravitons are emitted basically from the “surface” of the blackhole. If they’re emitted though is there a counterpart that gets consumed? And if it consumed a mass-associated particle does that link back to decreasing mass in a blackhole? ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2010, 1:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blackholes-and-gravitons/533129/9 "2010-03-21T01:32:42Z")
It must also be pointed out how speculative gravitons are. The General Relativity picture of gravity doesn’t fit very well into Quantum Physics at all. A “graviton” is what the force-carrying particle of gravity would be _IF_ gravity could be completely described by quantum physics, which currently it can’t. Gravitons are hypothesized as massless, electromagnetically neutral bosons of spin 2 simply because that’s the only set of properties a particle can have under quantum physics and not directly contradict the observed nature of gravity. ---
**Author:** ![JWT\_Kottekoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/3ec8ea/32.png) [@JWT\_Kottekoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JWT_Kottekoe)\ **Post date:** [March 21, 2010, 5:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/blackholes-and-gravitons/533129/10 "2010-03-21T05:37:32Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > There are _speculated to be_ bound states of gluons called glue balls. Nobody’s ever detected them yet, and nobody has a good enough model of the color force to even give a firm theoretical prediction of them. True enough, although it is possible that they’ve been detected. There are some candidates, but it is hard to distinguish glueballs unequivocally. The search continues.