Slashdot Mirror
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."
*Too complicated to coment*
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*
...both MECOs and Black Holes can exist, and it transpires that we actually know a LOT less than we thought we did
Karma: Bad. (As in Good?)
From the article:
"But Chris Reynolds of the University of Maryland, in Baltimore, US, says the evidence for a MECO inside this quasar is not convincing."
Apparently the experts are not conviced about this "interesting" observation but at slashdot the expert will come to a final conclusion. How many slashdot posters actualy are qualified to talk about these subjects?
200GB/2TB $7.95 Coupon: SAVE90DOLLAR
I know that there are cases where black holes have been indirectly observed by their effects on neighboring objects and light. Could these same data that were used to indirectly observe the black hole be adequately explained by the presence of whatever this other hypothetical object is?
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I was reading it fine until I hit the word "Penthouse", then I forgot everything else and had to look it up:
1 4/2330221
n g_an_old_bet
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/07/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking#Losi
Finally! Now that movie Contact doesn't have any scientific merit! (Like it did before...)
"Every time a bell rings, a Dell laptop bursts into flame."
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.
Ok, when we have, like, numerous observations of black holes (which, granted, have only been 'seen' indirectly, but which follow the predictions quite good and at least in one instance, have observed it directly enough to rule out anything else then a black hole) and just one observation of a MECO - especially when scientist themselves say it's not totally convincing - then logic dictates that it's more likely the black-hole theory is correct.
;-).
Until further obervations is being done and it is being confirmed it's truelly a MECO (or other MECOs are observed), then we really can't get say anything beyond wild speculation (which is what slashdot is very good at
Most probably, it will turn out to be not a true MECO, but rather an odd variant of a black hole.
If it DOES turn out to be a MECO, then, as theory predicts, there can't be any black holes - so then all our past obsrvations must have been wrong or misinterpreted. And if it turns out we have MECO's AND blak holes...well, then something very, very, very wrong must be going on with our current understanding of the universe and all the theories thusfar.
Which, actually, would be a fantastic thing to science, contrary to what some might believe.
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
So if these MECO are for real, then gravitational collapse canot result in a singularity, which is nice, right? Then how about the big bang? Does that need to have been a singularity, or can we continue with this programme of avoiding the nasty things?
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.
Okay... If this was detected in a quasar, and, as I understand it, quasars are insanely far away, with the implication that what we see of them happened insanely long ago... Is it possible that, as I think I once read here on Slashdot, some cosmological constants may really be variables that shift very slowly as the universe ages, and that MECOs were thus possible then, but no longer are?
Just askin', and my apologies if this is a stoopid question.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
The youngest observed quasar are billions of years old, so why can't an universal constant have changed since the beginning of the universe up to the point it would have changed the quasars and MECOs into galaxies and black holes?
Come on! This is slashdot! No-one needs to actually know anything about a subject to comment on it - we don't even read the fucking articles!
Maybe we should invade its surface, kill its plasma and convert it to black holeness.
If a MECO spits everything that it sucks in back out again at light speed... then, wouldn't it do the same thing with light itself? Making them visible and directly observable rather than having to indirectly detect them through their interactions with objects around them?
Eternally collapsing.... Never reaches the final state .... I think they are talking about Microsoft Vista. Please retag the thread as MS with that cool cyborg morph of BGates as the icon.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Accorfing to Stephen Hawking's Universe series Hawking was the one who bet that Black Holes don't exist (as some kind of insurance, so if they don't exist and all his work is useless, then he at least would get a subscription to a nice magazine) and he then gave the other guy (forgot his name) 1 year subscription to Penthouse, so if this is true and black holes don't exist, he would get the Penthouses back + a 4 year subscription to Private Eye. Why can't they co-exist though? Can't there be a reasionable scientific explanation that would allow both of these to live???
There are two kinds of people - those who are radioactive and those who have already decayed..
Preface: I have a Ph.D. in Astrophysics and my ressearch has to do with computer models of black holes.
This is yet another one of these things where an observational astronomer who just doesn't like black holes comes up with some incredibly complex theory to explain their oberservations so they don't need a black hole to explain them. There is an incredible resistance towards black holes in some parts of the astronomical community. Saying that "A black hole can't do this" when our models of accretion discs arount black holes are still at the state they are in i.e. fixed background metric, many models are only HD not MHD (no magnetic fields in the disc) is just not backed up by the facts.
This reminds me of the whole "we don't need black holes to explain jets" discussion a couple of years back.
Besides I do not se how the existence of Mecos would prevent the existence of black holes in general. We are still using the same Einstein Equations, right?
I think the operand word in the article is "controversial". Occam's Razor is a good rule of thumb.
Maybe we should invade its surface, kill its plasma and convert it to black holeness.
Maybe we should just ask it how it feels to think that it's a MECO, and no matter what it says, start up a government program designed to empower its sense of communinity with the black holes. Then, if Kofi Annan decides that the arrangement is suitably free of human suffering that no one in Europe will notice, we can assign a series of attractive Hollywood types to set the tone for more research by doing some short publicity pieces that will help all MECOs feel better about ejecting mass, even if it hurts other stellar objects (which isn't their fault, since the laws of physics are really just The Establishment and Hawking is just The Man, running Big Physics from his position of authority-backed, but morally weak institutional power).
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
MECOs are rivals to black hole theory and involve plasmas that never reach the state of being a singularity.
No singularity, but Meco did come out with that that singularly awesome Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk album back in '77. Take that, black holes!
Hawkins conceded the bet that black holes did NOT exist and gave the Penthouse subscription, so this could force him to reclaim that and claim his prize.
Hawkins called the bet an insurance policy so he would not be empty handed if black holes did not exist after all...
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
Here is a direct link to a (free) pdf paper describing the idea of a MECO in all the gory details:o n%2Fpdf&identifier=oai%3AarXiv.org%3Aastro-ph%2F06 02453
http://www.citebase.org/fulltext?format=applicati
As a physicist (though not a cosmologist) it looks not at all convincing.
Schrödinger would have loved anything he could stick a cat into. He hated cats. You should have heard him go on about the microwave oven, and the wood chipper.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I'll point out one problem with this that no one else has already, it is in New Scientist. That alone makes it probable pseudoscience. These guys have made a career out of taking one valid data point and building the rest of the line as they see fit. If this is believable, we will see mention in journals in the near future.
I believe the tidal effects would reduce a planet into a debris ring.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
I have thought for a long time that singularities were impossible due to conservation of angular momentum. Velocity is all relative, so if you have a spinning basketball and squish it down to half it's original circumference, the relative velocity of two opposing points on it's equator will double. Divide the circumference again and the relative velocity will double again. There is a lot of dividing that can be done between any rational number and zero (the theoretical diameter of a singularity), and if you have any spin in the original matter that relative velocity is going to hit the speed of light long before you hit zero.
bend like the reed
So given that there is no space, what explains the experiential artifact of space? Our known physical laws all operate in direct relationship to space. If everything follows the same rules and exists in a dimensionless void, what determines the apparent distortion in the way these particles interact? There is *something* different in the way the Earth interacts with the moon versus an asteroid in some other galaxy. Space has proven a useful concept in understanding the universe for some reason, and must be explained by some qualitatively similar property or force in a spaceless framework. For example, if I were to write a program that simulated the gravitational interactions of several bodies, the data would indeed exist in an irrelevant physical space, but I would need to store the values for each object's position and velocity. Does the universe have some type of data register for each particle? How do I conceptualize this?
Now, the really funky part is Hawking Radiation... You take a black hole with its event horizon, and at the edge, you have a particle-antiparticle pair form... They fly apart, and one of them crosses the line, getting sucked into the black hole, while the other escapes - and now you've actually gained a particle "radiating" away from the black hole. Because of a whole bunch of complicated stuff, this means that the black hole itself eventually evaporates (bigger it is, the longer it takes, though).
Oh, and this has been confirmed, since it's the driving force behind the Casimir Effect... Put two parallel plates close together, and the spontaneous particles between them can only form in wavelengths equal to multiples of the distance they're apart. But, outside the plates, any wavelength can form. So, you end up with more pressure outside the plates than between them, and they get pushed together. What makes it really stand out is, unlike gravity and magnetism with their inverse-square laws, the Casimir Effect has an inverse-fourth relationship. Halve the distance between the plates, and the force is 16 times stronger.
I suggest you read Slashdot
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
I've been wondering about that for some number of years now - but the fact that cosmologists have generally accepted the existence of singularities as all but proven fact and have even had many observations which supported this belief has always prevented me from thinking too hard about it (after all, why pit my amateur understanding of cosmology and relativity against that of experts?).
If this assertion proves to be tenable, what effect will it have on collateral theories in cosmology (for example, estimates on the total mass of the Universe, which in turn affects our understanding of whether or not space is curved and if so, positively or negatively)? Much of our current understanding of the cosmos is based directly on the correctness of the Theory of Relativity, but this finding (if confirmed) would appear to falsify at least some of relativity's conclusions. Does this tenative finding square with string theory? How much of Einstein's Theory of General Relativity will need to be updated to accomodate these findings?
Then again, the New Scientist isn't exactly the most unimpeachable scientific news source. Perhaps I won't trash Al's most famous (and best supported) theory just yet.
And its angular momentum will be unchanged. So what's the problem?
The math is difficult to reproduce on a slashdot posting, but I'll leave it to anyone interested as homework. Suffice it to say that for L = angular momentum, I = moment of inertia, and w = angular velocity, L = I * w. Also, for a uniform sphere, I = 2/5 m r^2, where m = mass of the sphere, and r = radius of the sphere. It's easy to show that if r (before) = 2 * r(after), then w(before) = .25 w(after) (where "before" and "after" mean before and after squashing the basketball). And since the velocity v of a point on the equator of the spinning sphere is v = 2 * pi *r *w, it's also easy to show that every time you halve the diameter of the sphere, the linear velocity of a point on the surface doubles. This means that when angular momentum is unchanged, the limit of the linear velocity of any point on the sphere is finite as the radius goes to zero.
In case it wasn't obvious, IWAPMIC (I was a physics major in college).
Sean
Nothing to see here. Move along.