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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 can't find any papers from the said authors on the physics archive, so these two obviously aren't well known or respectable among the scientific community. A lack of peer review in a strata where peer review accounts of all fault-finding leads me to believe this articles credibility is the same as those of new-age magazines who which posting about the Bermuda triangle and the creation fabled
self-professed scientists.
Until some well-known scientist confirms this, I think I'll just believe the 'official' story about black holes.
Just my 2 dollars.
"While these objects may abound in the universe, they also say that our entire universe may reside within a giant gravastar." That statement makes no sense - its saying that everything that exists or can exist, exists inside something else. Where does THAT exist? This sounds a lot like the Skinner Constant, or Finagle's Fudge Factor. (the number in engineering, which when added to, subtracted from, multiplied or divided by, gives you the right answer).
+1 karma to anyone who gets the title of this post
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
So what's on the outside of this giant gravstar we're in? :)
-Shadow
Mottola and Mazur have not worked out all the details of how gravastars might form. Yet they say the objects solve a flaw in black hole theory.
Call us when you work out those little details.
"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."
As I recall from reading Hawking's universe in a nutshell, if you consider black holes as being made of p-branes, waves in p-branes could encode all the states even if black holes had high entropy.
That's not a new idea. Well, the "gravastar" part is, but I think the "universe in a black hole" thing has been around for quite awhile.
Basically, if you look at the density/matter distribution required to create a black hole, and extrap. outwards, it turns out that the density vs. size of the universe as a whole is really close to what you'd need to make a black hole.
"Cosmologist Stephen Hawking has made a number of high-profile wagers on future discoveries. In 1975, he bet Kip Thorne a subscription to Penthouse (the loser would get it mailed to his home) that a celestial mystery named Cygnus X-1 would turn out to be a black hole. [I'm pretty sure only Thorne wanted Penhouse and Hawking wanted a different periodical] It didn't. In 1991, he again lost to Kip Thorne, betting $140 and a T-shirt "embroidered with a suitable concessionary message" that a naked singularity could not exist." A Brief History of Betting on the Future [Wired]
Almost identical story appeared 2 years ago:
;)
CNN version
Maybe there's a time dilation effect near a Gravastar?
I'm fond of saying that the only thing more difficult than imagining a beginning or ending of time is imagining time with no beginning or ending. I think the same can be said of space and hence the universe itself.
If you truly try, you will find both concepts equally awkward. You will also find we have few facts that ultimately support either. I can not make a case for either concept, but I can make a pretty good case for ignoring most people that insist they know the answer to which is true.
TW
...and each gravastar holds an entire universe which holds a finite number of gravastars each containing yet another universe and so on...
... nothing? Wouldn't it be easier on the limited human intellect to just assume that the gravistar->universe->gravistar-> encapsulation is infinite in each direction?
....
;-)
kind of like the russian dolls metaphor, eh?
Question: why would we assume that there is ever an outermost gravistar that holds the universe and then
Reminds me of Farnsworth's "universe in a box" experiment where each universe held a number of boxes each leading to a parallel universe in which Farnsworth had created a number of boxes which each holding a parallel universe
"Good news, everyone..."
Ow, my brain has just been subjected to a paralyzing blow -- think I'll take the rest of the day off and drink vodka tonics until the throbbing goes away.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
Well, how about justification for these theories as a way to get rid of the conflicts between general relativity and quantum mechanics? If black holes really aren't points, then maybe that points towards another way that the smooth spacetime vs. quantum foam problem could be resolved?
:)
Similar to the ideas of string theory (though I'm no physicist). And no-one would call the equations of string theory (or at least as much of them as are known) simple
At the top of the article:
Thick-Skinned Gravastars Vie to Replace Black Holes, in Theory
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 09:52 am ET 23 April 2002
Now c'mon, I can understand someone being dumb enough to post something from April 2003 and think it's news, from from 2002? And editors accepting it, damn...
This may also help explain how the Wormhole theories work between Black Holes and White Holes (Black being an entrance and White being an exit)...maybe the White Holes are exits from another Gravistar? Thus crossing dimensions...
OOhhh...I want the movie rights! =)
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
...then how do they explain that our universe seems to be accellerating in its expansion? Unless all the matter and gravitational forces are centered on the "shell" of the bubble...which seems to defy all current theories. Should not the bubble collapse inward upon itself as each section of the shell pulls on opposing sections?
The gravastar seems more weird than a generally accepted black hole.
It sounds like something literally out of "men in black".
They have a tough road ahead because they've invented (or adopted) a new "repulsive" force. Einstein fudged this into his equations to keep the universe from imploding.
This is nothing new since anytime phsyicists can't explain something they invent forces, mediums, plains of existence, and weird matter. Conundrums are good, they lead to new understanding (and new conundrums).
My initial reaction to his is a bit skeptical. Hawkins predicted bleeding black holes (via math) before anyone observed a black hole bleeding. The idea of gravity overcoming strong and weak nuclear forces and collapsing into a null or "minimal" space isn't weird, it makes a lot of sense. If we could truly see the size of physical matter, everything would be invisible. In the strictist terms, we really do live in god's "matrix".
-------- -------- Support Wesley Clark for president!!!
So what's on the outside of this giant gravstar we're in? :)
The "other side" of the same gravistar.
It's like "what's beyond the north pole" on a sphere.
On the surface of a sphere there is no "beyond the edge". Inside a kliensphere there is no "beyond the rim", because there is no rim.
Imagine the space in the universe is the 2-D surface of the water hanging from a dripping faucet. You're on the new-forming drip. Then the drip comes lose. The surface you're on closes into the surface of the drop. In 2-D there IS no beyond - you need an extra dimension for that.
Now consider a dripping faucet in 4-space, where the "surface" of the 4-D drop is the 3-D space of our universe.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If I am correct (no I am not a physicist) then if the temperature of the Bose Einstein Condensate drops below a certain threshold the hole thing explodes... If there are not only local gravistars but if the universe is one big one (as mentioned in the text). Could this be the base of a repeating Universe?? Question: does the theoretical gravistar have a regular repeating internal structure (especially near the end). If it is superregular the Universe would repeat itself in much the same fashion....
The very idea of a black hole entails that matter within its grasp is lost forever. (There is a proposed multi-billion year decay, but as far as I know this is still theoretical.) Trying to explain what is happening beyond the event horizon seems to me nothing but conjecture. It certainly fails the "empirical" requirement of scientific investigation.
We can extrapolate based on physical laws we observe outside of such entities. But to say, for a pertinent example, that the core of a black hole is a singularity vs. a new highly compact structure seems no more than conjecture. It might simplify equations to just treat the whole thing as a singularity, but this holds for any celestial body, and we know the simplification to be incorrect in everything but a black hole.
This may be a strawman, I'm sure you are talking about atomic structure, and how it behaves in high gravity situations. But here the reasoning holds true likewise. If the force that holds a neutron star from collapsing is passed, then either there is no further force to maintain the mass's structure or there is. But which is the case is, again, mere conjecture. We can't go into black holes, and we can't simulate the forces that create them.
So why do we make statements about their interior at all? Shouldn't we just stick to what we can know and investigate, such as how they form and how they interact with the universe once formed? Anything more is no more scientific than theology.
So this is a very interesting teory and certainly seems congruent to how [I understand] science to describe black holes. The difference is in the metaphor.
Culture seems to affiliate the concepts of 'entering' and black hole. After all, how can no matter 'escape' and the black 'hole' not become more massive? We think in terms of 'enter' or 'escape' oh, and there is also 'event'.
So this new gravastar metaphor seems less of these but is closer to concepts of 'barrier' and 'imprenatrable'. One could think that the 'other matter' that forms the 'surface' of the gravastar might be 'incompatible' with our own.
So if there might be such opposite forces at work containing a whole universe of energy wholly within a protective outter shell, what happens if/when the Gravastar 'pops'?
The Schwarzschild metric has a coordinate singularity at the event horizon, but there are alternate metrics for describing a black hole that do not. And the event horizon is not a local property, it's location depends in part on what the matter outside the black hole is going to do in the future. In short, I call BS on gravastars.
First, the article calls entropy "information", then it calls entropy "states". I think I'm going to stick with entropy being called "general disorder", as taught in basic thermo.
Then, the article refers to the Bose-Einstein Condensate, saying, "everything reaches a single state, called a quantum state." Now, in quantum objects (wells, lines, and dots), aren't all states quantized?
Finally, the article states that light cannot escape a black hole, but energy can. Well, which one is it?
On a side note, I believe it was Stephen Hawking who suggested that due to tunnelling phenomena, a black hole can eject light. When this occurs, the probability of ejection increases. Provided that the black hole consumes less matter than the matter-like waves it's releasing, it could reduce in mass until it no longer exists.
While every revolutionary theroy may come from somebody regarded as a crackpot, ALL the crackpot theories come from crackpots, too.
And I suspect the ratio is something more like 10000 to 1 for the "real crackpot" to "misunderstood revolutionary" ratio.
So remember-- while the occasional nutty theory turns out to be the new revolution, the truth of the matter is that most nutty theories are just nutty theories. Even if this is the ONLY way we get revolutionary theories, it doesn't change the fact that most of the time, the crackpots are crackpots. Give it time to sort itself out. If the theory proves viable, it will be shown over the next few decades.
"I'll apply the principal of Occams Razor. I.e.The simplest answer is most likely the correct one"
Who says that the black hole theory is the simplest one? Just because it was the first one, doesn't make it the simplest. The idea that a finite amount of matter could collapse itself into an infinitely small space with infinitely large gravity is certainly not the simplest explanation that I can think of. Nowhere else in nature does anything become infinitely anything.
I just want to point out that Occam's Razor doesn't say that the "simplest answer is most likely the correct one."
What Occam said was "entities should not be multiplied needlessly." Basically that if you have a couple of competing theories, the simpler on is preferable. It's reasonable to assume the one that doesn't complicate matters, but doesn't let you say that it's correct.
So you're still good going with the black holes, if this other theory just mucks things up more than black holes do, but don't say it's unequivically true because another theory is complex.
I doubt that most black-hole enthusiasts actually look at, or know the actual theory, it requires tensor math. Black-holes are a popular FAD, the theory has serious problems, and I am ticked off at the discovers that say "I don't what else could be that massive" as proof that they found one.
The equation for the time it takes for a particle to pass the event-horizon goes to infinite time as the event-horizon is approached. Some enthusiasts claim that this equation must be broken because the local-time viewpoint of the particle does not show the infinity, so they ignore it. My observation is that the local-time
equation is purposely constructed to not show such things. It purposely ignores the fact that local-time for the particle is slowing down and coming to a stop as the event-horizon is approached. The first equation still holds as a boundary condition on the local-time equation.
The upshot of this is that a mass that is contracting creates a bubble of time-dilation around itself. The closer it comes to the black-hole criticality, the more time slows and stops it. It can never actually reach black-hole density, and the event-horizon can never actually form.
I call this the theory of the Nearly-Black Hole.
It is consistent with the GRAVASTAR theory.
From any distance away it is just a massive object and nobody can prove otherwise. All the good effects of a black-hole can only be observed if you get within the event horizon. There are many explanations for what a massive object could be and it is not acceptable to claim to have discovered a black-hole just because you can not think of anything else that could be that massive.
The GRAVASTAR theory is consistent with this analysis and does not break the laws of physics the way that black-hole theory does.
The dense matter surround is just how highly time-dilated matter would behave. Additional force does not have any effect, it cannot move closer to the center of mass because time just slows more.
Most scientists do not take the black-hole theory as physical reality. We have discussions among ourselves, but the flashy black-hole theorists get on the news. It is about time (sic) that an alternate theory like GRAVASTAR has gotten some notice.
Emil has been working on this for years, and he's presented it at numerous conferences over the past year or so, including one I attended in Santa Fe over the summer. Check out this article, published Jan. 22, 2002 as well.
The book Pushing Gravity: New Perspectives on Le Sage's Theory of Gravitation consists of a number of speculative papers on the underlying cause of gravity, but in a "pushing" mode that lends itself to theorizing gravity particles (gravitons, although in a more 'concrete' sense than many theorists espouse). The papers are pretty fascinating, all arriving at near-Newtonian/Einsteinian equations, but predicting certain testable aberrations (e.g. changes with distance that might suit the rotation rates of galaxies without having to postulate large amounts of dark matter in the arms).
The proposed mechanisms by the various authors vary, but a couple of general points of agreement emerge:
One topic that gets discussed is that there may come a density and thickness of matter which absorbs practically all incoming gravitons.
This may put a limit on how dense a star can get, as regardless of how much matter is in the star, there will come a point where the innards get more and more shielded from graviton interaction.
Wouldn't be exactly like the gravastar, but one could imagine that the densest part of such a star wouldn't be in the center; it would be between a high-pressure, graviton-shielded inside, and a high-density, graviton-compacted outside.
It's an interesting possibility, anyhow :)
(*They do get into interesting questions like "where does the energy from the gravitons go?", and a couple tackle the question, "How do gravitons get regenerated?" - with the presumption that gravity isn't "running down" in the universe)
Binary geeks can count to 1,023 on their fingers
To be clear: Newton was not an oddball for drinking mercury. Many alchemists (the type trying to convert lead to gold, not the earlier type often thought of as precursors to scientists - at the time of Newton, Natural Philosophers were essentially the precursors to scientists) drank mercury to cure a number of problems. In the end, the poisoning killed/deranged so many they finally figured it out but by then, some of the brightest (well, not THAT bright) minds were long gone. Just to make the point that Newton wasn't alone in his decision to ingest a non-edible chemical. Ben
Fun through Gravity and Chaos