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!
"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?"
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.
So what's on the outside of this giant gravstar we're in? :)
"Dude... what if, like... our whole universe... is just one tiny atom... in the toenail of some giant dude?"
"Woah, dude."
Man, you should write scripts for the Matrix!
You can't take the sky from me...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Memory fading, but I'll be close...
The title comes from the retelling of a story in Carl Sagan's Broca's Brain where a 17th century philosopher/physicist (which one I can't remember) is giving a lecture on how the Earth moves in the Solar System, floating in space. A woman stands and claims the theory is ridiculous. She states everyone knows that the Earth rests on the back of a giant turtle. To which the scientist asks, "Well then, what is the turtle resting on?"
Her reply? "Very clever young man, but it's turtles all the way down!"
It's a great book.
Sig: I'm sorry but your opinion seems to be wrong.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
The last thing that gets sucked into the gravastar is the gravastar itself, which results in the formation of what scientists call a kleinstar, a four-dimensional construct where the inside is the outside (and vice versa). This neatly avoids any issues arising from the concept of having the universe contained within something that is itself within the universe, by moving the whole discussion into the realm of mathematical topology -- which nobody understands, but which we're all too embarassed to admit.
Remember to stock up on Klein bottles now, so you'll have something to drink out of once the kleinstar forms. ;-)
A marriage is always made up of two people who are prepared to swear that only the other one snores.
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
... 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. --
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
sorry, I am a physicist and need to correct a common misconception here... time does not slow down or stop inside the event horizon of a black hole. It only APPEARS to an outside observer that this is the case. If you were to fall into a very massive black hole, you wouldn't even notice anything "different" as you crossed the event horizon and your clock would indeed still "tick". However, someone watching you fall into said hole (from the outside) would see you move slower and slower as you approached the event horizon and would observe your clock to be running "slow". At the instant you hit the event horizon, you would actually appear to "freeze", with no further updates (since you are now inside the horizon and light can not cross the boundary in the outward direction). Hope this helps!
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
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