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Black holes 'do not exist'
Posted on Friday, April 01, 2005 @ 22:02:55 UTC by vlad
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Published online: 31 March 2005; | doi:10.1038/news050328-8 (www.nature.com)
by Philip Ball
These mysterious objects are dark-energy stars, physicist claims.
Black holes are staples of science fiction and many think astronomers have observed them indirectly. But according to a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, these awesome breaches in space-time do not and indeed cannot exist.
Over the past few years, observations of the motions of galaxies have shown that some 70% the Universe seems to be composed of a strange 'dark energy' that is driving the Universe's accelerating expansion.
George Chapline thinks that the collapse of the massive stars, which was long believed to generate black holes, actually leads to the formation of stars that contain dark energy. "It's a near certainty that black holes don't exist," he claims.
Black holes are one of the most celebrated predictions of Einstein's general theory of relativity, which explains gravity as the warping of space-time caused by massive objects. The theory suggests that a sufficiently massive star, when it dies, will collapse under its own gravity to a single point.
But Einstein didn't believe in black holes, Chapline argues. "Unfortunately", he adds, "he couldn't articulate why." At the root of the problem is the other revolutionary theory of twentieth-century physics, which Einstein also helped to formulate: quantum mechanics.
In general relativity, there is no such thing as a 'universal time' that makes clocks tick at the same rate everywhere. Instead, gravity makes clocks run at different rates in different places. But quantum mechanics, which describes physical phenomena at infinitesimally small scales, is meaningful only if time is universal; if not, its equations make no sense.
This problem is particularly pressing at the boundary, or event horizon, of a black hole. To a far-off observer, time seems to stand still here. A spacecraft falling into a black hole would seem, to someone watching it from afar, to be stuck forever at the event horizon, although the astronauts in the spacecraft would feel as if they were continuing to fall. "General relativity predicts that nothing happens at the event horizon," says Chapline.
Quantum transitions
However, as long ago as 1975 quantum physicists argued that strange things do happen at an event horizon: matter governed by quantum laws becomes hypersensitive to slight disturbances. "The result was quickly forgotten," says Chapline, "because it didn't agree with the prediction of general relativity. But actually, it was absolutely correct."
This strange behaviour, he says, is the signature of a 'quantum phase transition' of space-time. Chapline argues that a star doesn't simply collapse to form a black hole; instead, the space-time inside it becomes filled with dark energy and this has some intriguing gravitational effects.
Outside the 'surface' of a dark-energy star, it behaves much like a black hole, producing a strong gravitational tug. But inside, the 'negative' gravity of dark energy may cause matter to bounce back out again.
If the dark-energy star is big enough, Chapline predicts, any electrons bounced out will have been converted to positrons, which then annihilate other electrons in a burst of high-energy radiation. Chapline says that this could explain the radiation observed from the centre of our galaxy, previously interpreted as the signature of a huge black hole.
He also thinks that the Universe could be filled with 'primordial' dark-energy stars. These are formed not by stellar collapse but by fluctuations of space-time itself, like blobs of liquid condensing spontaneously out of a cooling gas. These, he suggests, could be stuff that has the same gravitational effect as normal matter, but cannot be seen: the elusive substance known as dark matter.
References
1. Chapline G. Arxiv, http://xxx.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0503200 (2005).
Source: http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050328/full/050328-8.html
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Re: Black holes 'do not exist' (Score: 1)
by tinlizzey on Sunday, April 03, 2005 @ 10:54:47 UTC
(User Info | Send a Message) | I'm not so sure how Ball can claim that Black Holes do not exist, based soley on the "prediction" that, at a stars death, or in a star's primordial era, the energy contained within is converted to a form of matter we know next to nothing about. This prediction, while it may hold merit, does not warrant such a substantial claim.
It is clear that General Relavitivity does not hold the key to explaining what may happen in unique regions of space-time, such as an event horizon or quantum singularity, or explain what happens on a very, very small scale. This inherent dilemma gives us the need for a unified theory, such as superstring / M Theory. Ball should 'hang around' for a while to see what happens with these new theories before making claims about the lifecycle of a star. If work in this new field proves successful, we may have the tools we need to explain what's really happening with dark matter, black holes, etc.
I'm interested in the idea that quantum fluctuations in space-time give rise to new forms of matter which are currently beyond our detection capabilities. I'm a firm believer that quantum physics will soon give us a more detailed description of a universe we're just begging to comprehend.
Perhaps, in the near future, we'll learn that black holes are even more mysterious than we'd ever imagined. If I may propose a theory of my own... perhaps black holes are the result of quantum singularities interacting with dark matter in such a manner that our physics can not yet describe. If anyone is interested in my thinking here, please let me know and I will elaborate.
Food for thought...
Aaron |
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