Re: What would happen if a cosmic string collided with a black hole?

Garry,

I will admit that I was not able to answer this question, it is far beyond my knowledge and ability as I have never studied Cosmic Strings until 4 days ago. So, to get an answer I searched the Web and found the central clearing house for information on Cosmological Topological Defects, Cosmic Strings, that is. This answer was provided by Robert Caldwell who maintains this Web page and works in the Theoretical Physics group at Cambridge, England. If you are not aware of a fact here, Professor Steven Hawking is head of this group.

According to Robert the String will simply be broken or totally absorbed by the Black Hole. From what I have read in `300 Years of Gravitation', edited by Hawking and Israel, strings are incredibly dense and may have strong gravitational fields. They are not of infinite tensile strength though and will be destroyed by black Holes. Interestingly, in some Cosmological theories strings may indeed have end points in Monopoles. If this is so than the Universe is a very strange place indeed. strings may also be open ended but only closed loops are of interest to Cosmologists.

I am sorry if this is a short answer without proof or explanation but the full explanation requires several pages of highly abstract Mathematics. If you have access to a University Library the full answer to your question was recently published in Physical Review D by Ian Moss. Robert also recommended reading the book `Cosmic Strings and other Topological Defects,' by Vilenkin and Shellard (Cambridge University Press, 1994).