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Possible Hole in Black Holes
jd writes "Researchers have found what they believe may be a MECO (Magnetic, Eternally Collapsing Object) inside of a quasar. MECOs are rivals to black hole theory and involve plasmas that never reach the state of being a singularity. The most obvious differences between them are that MECOs have a magnetic field and do not have an event horizon. The problem lies in that the Universe cannot have both MECOs and black holes — it can only have one or the other. If this object truly is a MECO, then black holes do not exist. Anywhere. (Furthermore, this would require Professor Hawking to return a year's subscription to Private Eye and give Professor Thorne a year's subscription to Penthouse.) On the other hand, if this thing isn't a MECO, it's behaving very very oddly for a black hole."
Why can't the MECOs and the black holes just set aside their differences and peacefully coexist?
Seriously, if this thing really is an MECO then what are all of the things that we've thought were black holes?
IANA*
Cosmology isn't my field but the data here is incredibly vague. I'm not sure this deserves more than a raised eyebrow and an "Okay...now come up with something a little less tenuous". Interpretation of data is an art in itself and can be wildly skewed by the observer's own opinions - show mw that this hasn't happened here.
Lets not forget that there is another alternative to one or the other theory being right, and that this alternative is far more likely, almost certain in fact.
The option is that neither of these theories are correct or rather neither is entirely correct. Both may still be partially true, and probably both are to a certain extent.
Newton was right on with his theories, yet they were proven to be incorrect, and they are still the first thing a physics student learns today. I find the idea of "if phenomina A exists then phenomina B, that we have also have some evidence for, cannot exist" because when you get right down to it we don't understand our universe we perceive it.
I wouldn't worry to much about this. As the article clearly states all observations were made with an optical telecope. They saw this mysterious "hole" in the center and made the assumption that there was nothing there. It could be full of hot gas but you wouldn't be able to detect it with a visible light telescope becasue the gas itself would not not emit any light. This is kind of like the monty python sketch where it was agreeded that a duck is made out of wood becasue it floats.
The problem that the grandparent pointed out is very real. While we need to assume that "the state of current knowledge" is sound and trustworthy to do any engineering it is fatal to make that assumption in science.
I had a friend who made a minor discovery while in undergrad, simply because he didn't fudge his data in a lab assignment. He got graded down for it, and decided to redo the experiment. When he got the same results, he started asking around and found out that quite a few of his classmates had also gotten the results he had, but written it off to "experimental error" since it didn't match the predicted outcome. He took this back to the professor, and challenged him to actually do the assignment himself. They wound up publishing a joint paper on it, but to me the most interesting realization was that, for all the years that assignment had been given, nobody else had caught the error in the accepted theory.
By all means, if you have to bet on the outcome of any particular situation, go with the current state of knowledge. But if you're asked if our current knowledge is correct in its entirety, bet heavily that it is not. And if observation doesn't match the theory, don't lock yourself into the assumption that the data must be wrong because the theory couldn't possible be.
--MarkusQ