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Black holes don't exist
  • Black holes have long captured the public imagination and been the subject of popular culture, from Star Trek to Hollywood. They are the ultimate unknown – the blackest and most dense objects in the universe that do not even let light escape. And as if they weren't bizarre enough to begin with, now add this to the mix: they don't exist.

    Merging two seemingly conflicting theories, Laura Mersini-Houghton, a physics professor at UNC-Chapel Hill in the College of Arts and Sciences, has proven, mathematically, that black holes can never come into being in the first place.

    Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-09-black-holes.html#jCp

  • 15 Replies sorted by
  • Please note - it is just one paper with theory :-) that contradicts with many observations.

  • The numerical solution presented in this work seems to indicate that the Hawkins radiation doesn't allow a star to collapse to a black hole. Interesting! While the concept of a black hole formed by the explosive collapse of a dying star is astounding, the possibility that matter from billions of stars can condense into a single super-massive black hole (SMBH) is even more fantastic. Yet we have an observational evidences that at the center of our Galaxy, should present an object Sagittarius A , that is hard to explain without invoking some super-compact super-massive object, such as SMBH. Recent radio interferometric observations show that the radio emission from Sgr A* comes from a region comparable in size to the Schwarzschild radius (2GM/c^2) of 0.1 AU (1.5x10^7 km)! Placing any known concentration of 4x10^6 solar masses within this tiny volume would rapidly condense to a black hole.

  • It depends on how you define a black hole. The redefinition of the Schwarzschild metrics in the 1970s (Schwarzschild worked c1916) essentially did away with the black hole as an area where no light could escape owing to gravity. Since "Hawking" radiation could escape, there was no more black hole, but a leaking hole.

    The more important metric is that galaxies do seem to be "swirling the drain". What's at the center is unknown, but just as there are many types of stars, one cannot rule out many types of black holes, and certainly the missing matter problem could be due in part to matter that is hidden within a gravitational well. Perhaps something like "gravity well" is better term, but "black hole" as a popular concept is what we have.

    The author (Mersini-Houghton) famously remarked a year ago "‘These anomalies were caused by other universes pulling on our universe as it formed during the Big Bang. They are the first hard evidence for the existence of other universes that we have seen."

    Of course there is no hard evidence for multiverses, but if there are, we could then find black holes in them, since their physics would be different, and so her new idea is not consistent with her other ideas.

    Having said that, there's no reason to believe that the "gravity wells" do not go through cycles just like stars.

    Papers that are published without peer review are usually problematic, although is a small but significant case, there are papers with merit that cannot find a publisher. Papers that are published without peer review in the mathematics-based part of physics have a long history of being wrong most of the time. It will be interesting tho check back on this story in a year or so, although no one has really checked the multiverse story from the previous year.

    In February 2014, two very well regarded astrophysicists, Carlo Rovelli and Francesca Vidotto, proposed a Planck star as the center of the gravity well. It would be interesting to see if this work resolves the anomalies, if any, from the Mersini paper.

    You can read Sabine's take on the Planck stars here http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2014/02/can-planck-stars-exist.html

  • The redefinition of the Schwarzschild metrics in the 1970s (Schwarzschild worked c1916) essentially did away with the black hole as an area where no light could escape owing to gravity. Since "Hawking" radiation could escape, there was no more black hole, but a leaking hole.

    I think calling it escape is wrong. As far as I remember (I am not pro in this, contrary to Igor who is pro and will correct me) whole radiation happens due fact that particles are born (and die) in vacuum. If two such pair particles happen to be on different sides of black hole horizon and one outside have enough energy it can "escape" :-) As I understand it is greatly simplified explanation.

  • Okay guys, the thing to remember is how water swirls clockwise going to your shower drain and therefore...okay, actually I know nothing about black holes. However can someone with background, like Igor, say something about why this work isn't in a peer reviewed journal? Is it just because it's new?

  • Okay guys, the thing to remember is how water swirls clockwise going to your shower drain and therefore

    It is also true for half of the world :-)

  • fundamental law of quantum theory states that no information from the universe can ever disappear.

    Information-theorie is just BS (and is by no means a fundamental part of quantum theory).

    Mersini-Houghton says the mathematics are conclusive.

    There is still NO theory of quantum-gravity - so, how could mathematics be conclusive? BS again.

    I don't say that her work has no interesting results, but the article linked in the first post is the usual half-baked bullshit that appears from time to time calling out a revolution (and I regret the 5min to read the article and write this text, as I should have known better;-)

  • 1972 Bekenstein posits an entropy state for black holes, thus redefining what it is. Bekenstein will remain largely uncredited.

    1973 Hawking goes to Russia and gets a lot of cool new ideas from the physicists there. Those physicists will remain largely uncredited.

    1974 Hawking provides the theory of how the radiation escapes, again redefining the term. After all, if nothing escapes, then something escapes, then that is a huge redefine, and one could argue that there could be a black hole that really is a black hole, not a leaky one, and now there are two basic models.

    The simplest (and arguably "not exactly right") explanation is that pairs of particles near the event horizon go in different directions, and that therefore the black hole loses mass (as it should, in some models). However "escape" is still correct, as the mass/radiation has to go somewhere (the information paradox), so it either escapes (Bekenstein-Hawking), or there are other theories. If the particles are created, and then only one is destroyed, that is also a problem. Some ppl use the term "emit" to avoid dealing with the origin of the particles, however the basic idea of the black hole is that "nothing can escape".

    However, part of the paradox is that if you define the black hole (and there are different definitions) as a true, hard line where nothing can escape, then one or both of these particles have to created just outside this theoretic radius. If just outside, they are not "escaping" in a literal sense from the inside, but in a theoretical sense. If the radius is a band, rather than a line, it has different properties, and you can adjust the theory to include this transitional area.

    According to the theory, and observer outside the event horizon should be able to see or detect the particle that escapes, but not the particle pair that falls back in. However, the basic premise of QM is that you cannot determine the information vis a vis location and momentum, so it is a bit of a wash as to what you might observe.

    The theory does not completely resolve the information paradox, as the information of the particle that falls back in may be lost.

    However, if the hole is some sort of gravity well, or a Planck star, then it would have different properties. Similarly, there is no reason to believe that all galaxies have the same type of centre.

    Getting back to the idea that "black holes cannot exist", this is a typical news grab scenario. But if the math is good, then that's a step forward.

  • @DrDave That physics blog you linked to has her FB page with some comments on the Black Hole topic. Some physicists are taking a few shots at it. Here's one of the quotes from FB:

    "using her reasoning, one would deduce supersonic nozzles would not exist because quantum phonons would overwhelm any classical hydrodynamic flow. Which of course is wrong."

    Gotta love it.

    Okay, let's see if this link works: https://www.facebook.com/sabine.hossenfelder

  • Sabine is a sharp analyst, and her blog is always good.

  • If somebody says "black holes do not exist" this usually does not mean he denies the existence of huge, extremely dense accumulations of matter. It's mostly the "singularity" aspect of the popular "black hole" model that is highly controversial - the theoretical physics professor whose lectures I heard when I was at the university did not believe the "singularity" aspect, either.

    I don't know which alternative model for the dense matter accumulations would be better, but I also don't think a singularity, being a very abstract mathmatical concept not observed anywhere in nature so far, is a very plausible thing to expect existing in reality. I would not be surprised if physicists one day agree on a "black hole" model that does not require the existence of a singularity.

  • I recall reading in A Brief History of Time -- actually skimming it years after I read it, I hardly remember any of it now -- a footnote or appendix to the original edition where Hawking corrected something he'd claimed earlier about black holes. More or less what he said in this footnote was that energy/matter does escape from a black hole, only in a very distorted form. If someone's got a copy around, maybe they can share.

    Years ago I was bouncing around the internet looking for alternate theories of physics, something having to do with a documentary I was working on, and I came across an astonishing site full of 'research' and 'papers' on some guy's unpublished theories, someone just out on their own on the West Coast somewhere. I wish I could find that site now. I was able to glean enough that I think I got his main concept, which I thought was pretty cool. He was saying that the Big Bang never happened, and the universe isn't really expanding at an accelerating rate, even though that's what appears to be happening. Instead, the universe is eternally growing smaller relative to the center. Or larger? Something like that.

  • Looking at it from another angle, the argument for white holes would also be in jeopardy. 'A 2011 paper argues that the Big Bang itself is a white hole. It further suggests that the emergence of a white hole, which was named a 'Small Bang', is spontaneous—all the matter is ejected at a single pulse. Thus, unlike black holes, white holes cannot be continuously observed—rather their effect can only be detected around the event itself. '

    A new model, developed by Carlo Rovelli and Hal Haggard from Aix-Marseille University called “loop quantum gravity” where gravity and space-time are quantized, woven from tiny-individual loops that can’t be subdivided any further.

    As a dying star collapses under its own gravity, it’s surrounded by a boundary called the event horizon: the point of no return, past which nothing can escape the black hole’s gravity. The star will continue to shrink, but eventually it will reach a stage where it can’t get any smaller because the loops cannot compress anymore.

    At this point, the loops exert an outward pressure called “quantum bounce,” which transforms the black hole into a white hole. According to the team’s rough estimates, it takes just a few thousandths of a second for a black hole to transform into a white hole. Yet even though the transformation is nearly instantaneous, the researchers say, black holes can still appear to us as lasting billions or trillions of years because their gravity stretches light waves and dilates time.

    If that’s the case, then rather than being shrouded by a true, eternal event horizon, black holes would be concealed by a temporary “apparent horizon,” Rovelli says. That’s important, because a true event horizon might violate the laws of physics.

  • From the observational point of view, I would not dismiss any theoretical theories, but I feel uneasy when we start to introduce terms which are by definition can not be disproved observationally. Therefore, I hesitate to comment on any astrophysical/cosmological terms which start with "black" and "dark". The neutron star is already a fascinating object, composed almost entirely of neutrons. What happens to a star that cannot maintain its further collapse by quantum degeneracy pressure? Till recently we were able to detect only those neutron stars which rotate and accrete the surrounding matter, but first results started to appear about thermally radiating neutron star. The Black Holes is one big step farther, and there are still no clear understanding, for example, what is happening with rotating Black Holes, which according to the law of conservation of angular momentum should rotate very fast.

    Observations are also a subject of errors. Let me remind of the recent controversial claims on the early cosmic inflation by the BICEP2 team, which were exaggerated by journalists (again w/o waiting for the reviewed publication), and later were questioned by the observations from the Plank space telescope .

    Sometimes it takes long time to have your results published in a peer reviewed journal, particularly if your research requires a referee(s) that is an expert in the same specific field and is willing to spend his/her time on analyzing your results. Nonetheless, it is healthy for the science to have debates, and therefore I'm glad to see the studies which are trying to shake the fundamental theories of modern physics and cosmology.