black holes may not exist after all

[guru]

Three cosmic enigmas, one audacious answer

DARK energy and dark matter, two of the greatest mysteries confronting physicists, may be two sides of the same coin. A new and as yet undiscovered kind of star could explain both phenomena and, in turn, remove black holes from the lexicon of cosmology.

The audacious idea comes from George Chapline, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin of Stanford University and their colleagues. Last week at the 22nd Pacific Coast Gravity Meeting in Santa Barbara, California, Chapline suggested that the objects that till now have been thought of as black holes could in fact be dead stars that form as a result of an obscure quantum phenomenon. These stars could explain both dark energy and dark matter.

This radical suggestion would get round some fundamental problems posed by the existence of black holes. One such problem arises from the idea that once matter crosses a black hole's event horizon - the point beyond which not even light can escape - it will be destroyed by the space-time "singularity" at the centre of the black hole. Because information about the matter is lost forever, this conflicts with the laws of quantum mechanics, which state that information can never disappear from the universe.

Another problem is that light from an object falling into a black hole is stretched so dramatically by the immense gravity there that observers outside will see time freeze: the object will appear to sit at the event horizon for ever. This freezing of time also violates quantum mechanics. "People have been vaguely uncomfortable about these problems for a while, but they figured they'd get solved someday," says Chapline. "But that hasn't happened and I'm sure when historians look back, they'll wonder why people didn't question these contradictions."

“People have been uneasy about these problems with black holes, but figured they'd get solved. That hasn't happened”

While looking for ways to avoid these physical paradoxes, Chapline and Laughlin found some answers in an unrelated phenomenon: the bizarre behaviour of superconducting crystals as they go through something called "quantum critical phase transition" (New Scientist, 28 January, p 40). During this transition, the spin of the electrons in the crystals is predicted to fluctuate wildly, but this prediction is not borne out by observation. Instead, the fluctuations appear to slow down, and even become still, as if time itself has slowed down.

source: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=...line-news_rss20 & digg

Dark energy star ???

[vincent]

I'm not buying it. Dark energy first has to be detected, it can't just exist as hypothetical non-baryonic matter, for this to be the case for the explanation of what has been observed as blackholes. I'm not too keen on my physics but i say that blackhole formation makes alot more sense to me.

[Rob2687]

Well isn't a blackhole kind of a hypothetical thing too? I mean the singularity is said to have infinite gravity and space time and what not but infinity is really just a concept. Not really anything quantifiable or anything that has been detected or observed before. ( as far as I know :unsure: )

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Edited March 11, 2006 by Rob2687

[MonkeyClaw Veteran]

From what I remember hearing rob, they had detected the expulsion of gamma rays in massive jets which is presumed to be coming from black holes, sort of like its waste.

[raid517]

I won't discount anything. If this theory still has legs in 4 or 5 years, then we will see. But there is a great deal of anecdotal and direct observational evidence for the existence of black holes, so until this is explained away too, I wouldn't personally hold out too much hope that this theory will change very much.

GJ