I think that, in any situation where the incoming neutron star is sufficient to cause collapse, it itself is captured in the resulting hole. Though it is interesting to note that, in situations like this, it’s possible for the event horizon to initially form in a completely empty and even flat region of space. It’s even possible for an event horizon to form, and for an observer to cross (or be crossed by) it, without even ever seeing any of the stress-energy responsible for its formation.
If matter falls all the way in to the singularity, do the stronger and stronger tidal forces eventually strip everything apart to the lowest level? Molecules pulled apart, atoms pulled from the molecules, atomic particles pulled from atoms, sub-atomic particles pulled from atomic particles, etc.
No, AFAIK Hawking postulated imaginary time as a way to eliminate the paradox of the Big Bang singularity, suggesting instead a finite but unbounded Euclidian spacetime in which imaginary time is equivalent to a spatial dimension and in which the Big Bang is merely an ordinary coordinate point, like the North Pole. It has (AFAIK) no relation to the physics of the interior of a black hole.
Yeah, pretty much all the way until our understanding of physics breaks down. It may stop once it gets to quarks, or there may be something even more fundamental, and the quarks start breaking down.
Not a physics person here, just my layman imagination. For some reason I imagine a substance that is pre-atomic and somehow is the combination of matter and energy before they ever became separated so it is a unique substance that is not known anywhere in the physical world a total dimension we could not comprehend or recognize. I think it decays or degrades into matter.
I didn’t realize I was in GQ when I posted, my apologies.
OK, now define “substance”.
Slight tangent - one of the weird things about neutron stars is that under some circumstances, adding mass will make the neutron star smaller (adding more mass increases the internal pressure sufficiently that the density increases enough to shrink the star’s radius in spite of the increase in mass).
Everyone now knows that matter, at the center of a black hole, is converted into a tesseract of Matthew McConaughey’s daughter’s bedroom. And some even argue Matthew McConaughey himself is infinitely dense. Or at least his Lincoln commercials are.