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".
I never did research to investigate the black hole theories, nor will I do research on this. I'll leave that to others. But new ideas tend to be a positive thing, even if they may seem outlandish at first. And what's with this "self-professed scientists" title? It's not as if "credible leaders" in a field haven't been wrong before. I look forward to others looking into this. When Slashdot posts about an article that hasn't been peer-reviewed because it's new, someone complains because it's too new? geesh. I'm sure we have some knowledge members among the Slashdot audience that can tell us more. Maybe Slashdot posting the article brings it to their attention and peer-review will occur sooner. Maybe it's not worth reviewing. We'll see.
In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. - Paul Harvey
Let me just say that every 4 months or so somebody writes a paper that tries to explain black holes as something other than black holes. Some of these papers are good, and some are not, but the fact remains that there are people out there who just don't like the idea of black holes and try to come up with other explainations.
Usually these explanations are far more complex physically than a black hole, so until I see a compelling, scientifically verifiably alternative to the theory of black holes I'll apply the principal of Occams Razor. I.e. The simplest answer is most likely the correct one. Theories that are 30 times more complex than black holes but are not measurably different I'll continue to ignore.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
-- Carl Sagan