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".
the /dev/null of the universe!
But can they make a new non-stick pan surface out of it?
Will it chase your ship around yelling out I hunger ? :P
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
after all, all of the bug reports submitted to Microsoft have to be stored somewhere
Its only noon... now I have a headache :(
This new theory attempts to fill holes in the currently accepted concept of the "black hole".
Ha Ha Ha! Your puny theory will never escape from the irresistible gravitic pull of this horrible pun...
--
Was it the sheep climbing onto the altar, or the cattle lowing to be slain,
or the Son of God hanging dead and bloodied on a cross that told me this was a world condemned, but loved and bought with blood.
Be carefull when clicking on those "picture of a black hole" links ;)
"Dude... what if, like... our whole universe... is just one tiny atom... in the toenail of some giant dude?"
"Woah, dude."
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
"So what you are saying is that an atom inside our fingernail..."
"That atom could contain a teeny, tiny universe."
"Woah!.................Can you sell me some pot?"
"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.
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.
True, but a lot of people thought Einstein and Newton were crazy too, and they didn't exactly have many peers at first to verify and critique their information, as they were just cast off as silly just as you've done.
Everyone's gotta take chances, and just because they don't have a long dignified history of work doesn't mean their words are invalid from the get-go.
FWIW, NASA ADS returns 22 abstracts.
So what's on the outside of this giant gravstar we're in? :)
So does this explain where the SCO evidence went?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
That search engine at http://xxx.lanl.gov/find is hard to use isn't it?
But I found these papers for Emil Mottola and these for Pawel Mazur.
Read Epic the first RPG novel.
-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.
Now Disney is going to have to refilm "The Black Hole"! For some reason I think that "The Spherical Void" just will not be as much of a hit with the little ones.
Lee Smolin has a great book on black holes as universes and applies evolutionary theory to universe creation.
The Life of the Cosmos. Very good read.
-Shane
I love teh int4rw3b!!!!!111one1
Just my 2 dollars.
Inflations a bitch, ain't it?
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
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
Someone luckily stashed a PDF of this (Copyright 1999 The Onion).
There you go.
Per Thomas Kuhn's theory on the structure of scientific revolutions, real changes in the way we understand science always start out as a crackpot theory. see the Reciprocal Systems website for more. My Uncle is an adherent of this theory, and he has some uncanny evidence for why it is applicable to real physics, large and small.
While conventional thinking won't get you put in a nuthouse, nor will it solve the dilemmas of physics. Even physicists say this.
its matter is transformed into a spherical void surrounded by "an extremely durable form of matter never before experienced on Earth."
Isle 3, womens's underwear. 5 for $2.00 - durable, breathable, washable, wearable.
You can't conceive of "zillions of states hiding in a black hole" but you can facily throw us the concept of an infinite universe ruled by an infinite mystical entity not of that universe but having a one-to-one correspondence with that universe? I think I'll nominate you for the Miles Hayes Award for explaining the simple in terms of the complex.
Personally, I suspect that what we're looking at is the conservation of information--the indestructable info-quantum.
Hic iacet Arthurus, rex quondam rexque futurus.
Almost identical story appeared 2 years ago:
;)
CNN version
Maybe there's a time dilation effect near a Gravastar?
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.
Here's another link to a similar story at Scientific American if your interested:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?art"...its matter is transformed into a spherical void surrounded by 'an extremely durable form of matter never before experienced on Earth...'"
one pound of which weighs over TEN THOUSAND pounds!
Singularities are where the math stops working. There is no reason to believe they have any reality. Gravitational singularities can't exist because they rely on infinite compression, which is impossible because of quantum mechanics.
No, you can't .... and for the same reason that you can't use that argument to search for black holes. The hole/gravistar itself must be very cold, but matter surrounding the hole/gravistar would be heated during infall, emitting a large amount of energy. The physics of this are quite interesting, and covered in many introductory texts in general relativity and astrophysics; search for information on "accretion disks".
They're predicting something that can't be observed. From outside the event horizon, both a point-like black hole and the sphere-like black hole will look identical. Theories that cannot be disproved are boring. Move along, nothing to see here.
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.
This is somthing I wrote a while back: I call it the Imploding Universe. So, a sigularity is where all the formulas blow up ... right ? The IMPLODING hypothesis goes a bit like this; all matter in the black hole becomes a single point in which the space/time fabric is re-ignited in a whole new universe.
So what appears to be an expanding universe is really a remnant effect of the imploding nature. The reason the universe appears to be expanding is because matter is uniformly shrinking and space is expanding to take it's place. The quantum mechanics is explained as a rebirth of the matter.
The "dark energy" observation may well be effects of implosion. ...
Since then, string theory talks about 'Brane's. So it is quite concievable that "our" universe is within one of these "Branes" and that the "seeping of matter into the brane happens when a "tear" in the current brane is formed from the extreme acitivity of gravitons (since the hypothesis is that gravitons pass through branes while EM and Nuclear forces do not.
This is really spooky.
Yep, thats MY theory. You have to admit it's cute. Universe's popping up all over the place ...
Heh. Neverminding that the physics archive isn't peer reviewed and me the junior in a physics program could post my papers on artificial gravity and flying saucers there, one has to still step back and say 1) Other people have already pointed out enough that there are papers by the authors all over the place, and 2) Los Alamos National Laboratory tends to be a step above your average community college: people who are there get there because they tend to know what they're doing. When one of them suggests a completely different theory, maybe a brainless shmuck who never got past Newtonian Mechanics shouldn't be pulling out crap comparing them to creation-scientists or posts about the Bermuda triangle. Drugs are bad.
The peer review starts now and ends when someone either proves black holes or disproves this theory. Right now the 'official' story is also in process. Belief is a wonderful and transient thing. The things that people believed 50 years ago are not exactly the same as the things that most people believe in today. This is true in both our daily lives and the sciences. Go back 100 years and you'll see that our predecesors were mostly wrong about a lot of things.
As far as this theory is concerned, I have some doubts but I am willing to hear them through. As for Black Holes, I have some long standing concerns which have never been sufficiently answered. The inner workings of a Black Hole, like time before the Big Bang, is currently unknowable. They are still only theories and should be labeled 'under consideration'.
But don't take my word for it. Believe anything you want to believe. Doesn't make it so or you smart or this new theory stupid.
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
True, but for every Einstein there are a number of individuals who actually are crazy and whose theories actually are asinine. There is a reason that papers are peer reviewed.
I can convince myself that I am capable of imagining time going on forever (i probably cannot) but I cannot convince myself that time has already occured for an infinite amount of time.
When I try to think of time having already existed forever, then, I start to think about how some random configuration of particles that looked exactly like me has randomly been in this same spot, doing the same things I am doing...
WORSE, that this thing that looks and sounds like me and has the same name, has already done some of the things I've been meaning to do, and then I don't feel like doing them, cause A, I already did them, and B, I'll just have to do them again.
At which point the only thing I care to think about is the infinite other versions of me that have existed through time, sitting on a Lazy Boy recliner watching Cartoon Network all day, and give him a double thumbs up. Cause, in the end, that's what it's really all about. And that would be the clincher folks, undeniable proof that I am right.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
At least I mostly forgot about this dupe before I read it.
... that if you do enough navel-gazing, you will turn yourself inside out.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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...
The parent's reasoning is flawed, and probably a troll, but here goes:
I know several idiots with college degrees.
The same skills that make one a brilliant theorist, artisan, thinker, etc. are not necessarily the ones that help you complete a degree program.
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.
...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.
... a lot of people thought Einstein and Newton were crazy ...
Newton did go crazy, from (among other alchemical things) the mercury he ingested.
-kgj
-kgj
Gravastar. What is that all about? Is it good or is it whack?
It's a minivan. You've been skipping over the commercials again, haven't you?
Has he come up with anything unique? What?
Hawking came up with the idea of Hawking radiation, which is a quantum-mechanical mechanism for matter to escape from a black hole. The basic idea is this: a quantum fluctuation creates a matter/antimatter pair of particles near the event horizon of a black hole. The antiparticle falls in, destroying some of the mass of the black hole, while its partner escapes. The net effect is as if the black hole had emitted a particle.
What I don't understand about this concept is where the energy from the antiparticle annihilation gees. However, this is just limited understanding on my behalf, and I believe that Hawking radiation is a widely-accepted notion.
On a side note, it has been demonstrated that the surface area of a black hole behaves like entropy, in that it is subject to something akin to the second law of thermodynamics. Anything with entropy should have an associated temperature, and anything with a temperature should radiate. This radiation is Hawking radiation.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
The double-edge sword of innovation. Do you spend the money on R&D or do you go with what works? Do you wait to follow the coat-tails of your competitor or do you lead your competitor by your coat-tails? Not easy questions to ponder when the costs are real and measurable. It's a gamble, not unlike the lottery, but your odds are better with the quality of your research and the theories you build on.
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
-- Carl Sagan
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'?
Wrongo. Note that none of these preprints (dealing specifically with the gravistar concept) are peer-reviewed.
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
I am Gravastar! Beware I live! Run! Run! Run!
I am Gravastar! I hunger! Run, Coward!
Run! Run! Run!
True, but a lot of people thought Einstein and Newton were crazy too, and they didn't exactly have many peers at first to verify and critique their information, as they were just cast off as silly just as you've done.
The difference here is that Einstein and Newton both were faced with observations that contradicted the best theories at the time. Now there's a good starting point for a new theory. As for gravastars, there's no need to find an alternative for black holes until we have observations that contradict our present theories about them. So far, there are none -- the points about entropy remain moot, as they can be explained in precisely the same way in black hole theory as with gravastars: behind a black hole there very well could be another world.
This leads to the corollary that this world is the nether side of some black hole -- which is equivalent to what the gravastar researchers conclude within their framework. The problem for the gravastar theory is the infamous Occam's Razor. Their theory is more complicated than the black hole theory it is trying to replace, and unnecessarily so because it does not bring about any new explanations. Just a word play on the old stuff, basically.
Sure, it's fun to play the game of 'what if', and little harm can come of it, and there's always a possibility that one ends up with something that is actually better than the best existing theory. It's good for raising research funds. As a method for advancing knowledge it's no better than filling a room with typewriters and monkeys.
It seems to me that this theory is a very complex way of explaining away a very simple theory. I'll reserve judgement though until we can get some hard data from the near vicinity of a black hole/gravastar.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
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.
However, research into conecpts that turn out to be wrong or seemingly useless can be valid and useful, provided the hypothesis is founded in some modicum of real scientific observation. Even if the hypothesis turns out to be bunk, the observation is still valid, and the question is still valid. Therefore, the reserach that was done simply demonstrated what was incorrect. We can apply some of the lessons learned during that misguided research to what comes later on. We now know what doesn't adequately explain what is observed.
There's a quote from Edison, something along the lines of "Trying to create a lightbulb, there were not 100 failures. I found 100 ways to make a nonfunctioning lightbulb."
There is a reason for everything. Sometimes that reason just sucks.
No it is logical
...
Given:
1. God exists
2. God is high order infinite(Gamma) {knowledge space time}
3. The Afterlife is low order infite(Beta) {time future}
4. God will extrude into the afterlife
5. God will participate with those in the afterlife
Assumption:
1. Based on my beliefs I will also be in the afterlife.
BR Looks like just one Assumption...Of course you could put all the givens as also assumptions, but
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
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.
The energy from the anti-particle interacting with any matter in the black hole goes to increasing the entropy of the black hole. That's why what hawking theorized (and still works on) is called black hole entropy. Before Hawking no one thought a black hole should have entropy. But he showed how it is possible.
The black hole radiation happens exactly as you describe.
The process that you alluded to where the surface area of a black hole behaves like entropy is sort of true. The fact is, there is a direct relation to how much information that can be stored in a volume and the surface area of the volume. If you think in terms of entropy as information degradation, then the smallest unit of information equals the smallest unit of volume, which also equates to the smallest unit of entropy.
I guess Steven Hawking has to cancel that Playboy subscription.
(if you don't get it, move along. There is something to "get" and your mod points are needed elsewhere. Thank you.)
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
on the subject can be found in the New Scientist journal or...here:
http://www.sciforums.com/t5376/scd6aa1f3497a9a8949 43c2c19febdb24/thread.html
You can also possibly view the Mazur and Mottola submission (preprint) at:
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/grqc/0109035
A google search on gravistars turns up several sources that are perhaps better than the space.com readers digest article.
Now people, get a hold of yourselves. Most, if not ALL, of you are fully unqualified to poo-poo the idea just as you are unqualified to critique black hole "science". It is downright stupid to poo-poo the idea and hold the classic black hole idea as sacrosanct. No one. NO ONE has seen a black hole. They are ENTIRELY ghosts of the imagination INFERRED from observations that are wholly in accordance with the idea of gravistars OR black holes.
Claiming that the idea of gravistars requires too much "hand waving" ignores the fact (stone cold fact, that is) that the idea of a black hole itself requires an incredible amount of hand waving and eye covering to get past its very real problems.
The jury is still out on black holes. If another idea accounts for the same observations while at the same time avoiding the many problems that black holes create...well, it would end up being a better theory outright. The gravistar deserves a real chance to germinate and grow on its merits and math and must not be tossed out the door on the principal that it violates the holy black hole doctrine.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
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.
Papers get peer-reviewed before publication (or submittal for that matter) to find flaws in them, suggest fixes for those flaws and in general serve as a check for problems large and small in the work. It doesn't always work that way in practice of course, but that's the idea. Think of it as a private beta test. Papers get peer-reviewed after publication by people who read the journal they were published in. These people will suggest/try additional experiments designed to test the hypothesis and will publicly criticize anything they don't like with widely varying degrees of politeness - "I'm underwhelmed" to "This is obviously faked data".
Also, a theory in the scientific sense is a strongly tested hypothesis that fits the data better than other models do. A lot of what people refer to as theories would, in a strictly scientific context, be considered hypotheses. Or guesses.
"Bugger this, I want a better world." - Jenny Sparks
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.
IANAP (I am not a physicist), but another source of radiation that ive heard theorised is the it is possible/probable for a pair of particles to spontaneously form out of the vacuum of space, then collapse on themselves.
If this happens at the event horizon, one particle gets sucked in, the other particle ejected.
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
> einstein suffered terribly in school, guess that makes him a moron too, eh?
While popular culture holds that Einstein was a drop-out, a lowly patent-office clerk, and an outsider who stood the scientific world on his head, he was in fact the equivalent of a modern PhD candidate in the last year of a PhD program. In 1900 he graduated with the equivalent of a bachelor's degree or higher, qualified to teach both math and physics at the university level. When he published his famous papers in 1905 he was what we now call an ABD ("all but dissertation"), and in fact he submitted his dissertation On a new determination of molecular dimensions that same year, earning a PhD in physics at U. Zurich.
More detail here.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade