Slashdot Mirror
Black Holes No More -- Introducing the Gravastar
Mark Eymer observes: "From the Space.com article: 'Emil Mottola of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Pawel Mazur of the University of South Carolina suggest that instead of a star collapsing into a pinpoint of space with virtually infinite gravity, its matter is transformed into a spherical void surrounded by "an extremely durable form of matter never before experienced on Earth."' While these objects may abound in the universe, they also say that our entire universe may reside within a giant gravastar." This new theory attempts to fill holes in the currently accepted concept of the "black hole".
An article about Grevestars showed up in Scientific American a few months back I remember...
It was an interesting article, but they seemed to be a ways off from anything solid...so to speak.
FWIW, NASA ADS returns 22 abstracts.
Actually, anyone can upload papers to the archive (the main site is now at www.arXiv.org). There's no peer review involved -- that's why it's called a _preprint_ archive -- and no respectability is conferred by simply uploading a paper to it. The fact is that there's a lot of crap on arXiv (though not as much as you might expect), and there are also a lot of people who don't use arXiv.
But apart from that, your comment is irrelevant anyway since these two do have plenty of articles on the server, as seen in a previous reply to your post.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
For those of you with short memories, Slashdot covered the gravastar theory when it was announced last year.
See these articles:
Black Holes Disputed, 1/19/2002
Doubting the Existence of Black Holes, 3/26/2002
There must be black holes. That's how articles in the editors' database mysteriously disappear so they can be duped later.
First: Some following posts show the author didn't even do a rudimentary search of the archive let alone anything else. A place to start for example, "Where are all these zillions of states hiding in a black hole?" Mottola said in a recent article in New Scientist magazine. "It is quite literally incomprehensible." or The "unique and remarkable properties" of a gravastar "could explain several high-energy astrophysical phenomena that now are puzzling," says Marek Abramowicz, a black hole expert at Gothenburg University. Oh, and Mottola was a researcher at Los Alamos' Theoretical Division. RTFA, dude.
... yes, it was released by a very presitigious research lab.
Second: Anyone involved with the scientific community in the least, should know that peer review is actually quite a contentious issue and by no means considered as accounting for "all fault-finding".
Third: The theory itself resolves some troubling issues with black hole theory. The latter has become so fashionable that even lay men speak of them without seeming to question some of the root concepts that stretch all but a seasoned physicist's imagination. A quote from a related article: Physicists have struggled for years to account for the huge entropy of black holes, and largely have failed. Unlike their black hole counterparts, Gravastars would have a very low entropy.
Finally: This linkis to the Los Alamos release
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.