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Physicist Claims Black Holes Mathematically Don't Exist
Koreantoast writes: Black holes, the stellar phenomena that continue to capture the imagination of scientists and science fiction authors, may not actually exist. According to a paper published by physics professor Laura Mersini-Houghton at the University of North Carolina and Mathematics Professor Harald Pfeiffer of the University of Toronto, as a collapsing star emits Hawking radiation, it also sheds mass at a rate that suggests it no longer has the density necessary to become a black hole — the singularity and event horizon never form. While the arXiv paper with the exact solution has not yet been peer reviewed, the preceding paper by Mersini-Houghton with the approximate solutions was published in Physics Letters B.
"I'm still not over the shock," said Mersini-Houghton. "We've been studying this problem for a more than 50 years and this solution gives us a lot to think about... Physicists have been trying to merge these two theories – Einstein's theory of gravity and quantum mechanics – for decades, but this scenario brings these two theories together, into harmony."
"I'm still not over the shock," said Mersini-Houghton. "We've been studying this problem for a more than 50 years and this solution gives us a lot to think about... Physicists have been trying to merge these two theories – Einstein's theory of gravity and quantum mechanics – for decades, but this scenario brings these two theories together, into harmony."
this scenario brings these two theories together, into harmony."
and into direct conflict with observations. I'm going to guess your math is wrong, not that black holes don't exist.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
and actually, as an addendum... whether right or wrong, she also clearly has massive cojones to put this out there. kudos to her.
just that they never collapse further than the state that gravity can overcome the speed of light.
It sounds like a new term like "black star" rather than "black hole" might be in order. Because the stars at the center of our universe are orbiting around something really heavy that doesn't emit any visible light.
If I'm reading this right there's something really big and heavy there, we just can't see it.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Perhaps you're observing phenomenon that appear to be Black Holes but are really gravstars or other normal stellar phenomena that don't require exotic and contradictory explanation and you don't realize it.
After all, just because you learned something growing up as a child doesn't mean it's true.
You are after all doing remote observation on objects that are 100's to billions of light years away.
No, you indirectly observe what are supposed to be black holes, or better yet, you directly observe instrument readouts that you interpret as indicating the existence of black holes. If this paper is correct, perhaps a different interpretation is in order, and exciting science can be done.
Microscopic invisible critters living on magnets shoot out invisible rubber band tethered harpoons at anything metal they see nearby. These beings are known as Magtonians. They feed on metal, but since they're microscopic you'll never actually see the damage. You can prove this by holding a magnet in your fingers and getting it close the metal, you can feel the rubber bands stretch and snap as you move the magnet close to metal and pulling it away. Some of the Magtonians can shoot their harpoons further than the others, that's why the pull increases as you get the two objects nearer to one another. More Magtonians successfully launch and attach the closer the magnet gets to metal.
There's another interesting fact about Magtonians. The males live on one side of the magnet, and the females on the other. However when the two are separated the females stay on one side and the males on the other. They're horny little bastards. This is why the pull of the harpoons are stronger when you use two magnets instead of just metal as both genders are launching their harpoons towards the others land.
Magtonians are not gay however and don't like the introduction of other Magtonians of their own sex into their group. When you try to introduce two male sided Magnets to one another or two female sided magnets to one another instead of harpoons they will try to keep themselves apart by extending poles pushing the two magnets apart. This is where the term "polarity" comes from. These crafty Magtonians are even fairly good at flipping the opposing magnet over with their harpoons and poles. Try it, try setting one disk magnet on top of the other with same sex sides facing, they will usually flip in mid air pole induced flip then quickly harpoon together.
Rubbing a magnet on a piece of metal will cause some of the Magtonians to fall off off and take up new residence on their food source, thus creating a new home for them and turning what was once a simple piece of metal into a new magnet.
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I don't think we can just assume something is fact because it fits with what we know right now. Modern physics was built on quashing the assumptions that infinities and infinitesimals exist. We cannot go arbitrarily fast, and we cannot chop things up infinitesimally small, or measure to an arbitrary accuracy. These ideas were built in to classical mechanics as deeply as black holes.
To be clear I am not saying that black holes do not exist and what we observe and call black holes are not black holes. Just that when we are dealing with artifacts of mathematical models, time could identify them more as artifacts of the model rather than the most useful representation of the observable universe.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
"After all, just because you learned something growing up as a child doesn't mean it's true."
Or perhaps the sensationalist non-peer reviewed paper making wild claim about the nature of the universe will wilt under scrutiny?
I generally don't throw out everything I learned as a child the first time I hear a contradictory claim, I perk up my spidey sense and look for extra info pro/con and decide if it is time to adjust my mental model of the world around me. Often it turns out that wild claims are a load of bunk from crackpots (shocker!).
My favorite early formative experience like this from my teenage years was a guy at a cafe who, after overhearing my step-dad and me talking engineering, and posed a riddle about a piece of string wrapped around the earth, and if by adding some length (I forget now) while evenly raising its height above the ground, could a poodle walk under it? Turns out that simple analysis showed his answer was completely wrong and BS (he claimed it took miles, while it takes 2*pi*poodle). My take-away was to be skeptical of crack-pots making wild claims about the world, they are often either idiots or wrong (especially if they clearly have an anti-science agenda).
Protip: Get a sense of humor. You are the reason why he had to qualify it.
No, that's not possible. Per definition a black hole cannot be observed. If it could, it would have to allow light to escape its event horizon.
You're being pedantic. Indirect observation is still observation, and they're indirectly observing things that behave consistently with our theory of black holes. As for black hole formation, which is what the article is actualy about, I don't think they've ever observed such a thing.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
How is it at odds with observations? We've (indirectly) observed some of objects consistent with our theories of how black holes would behave, but to the best of my knowledge we've never observed the *formation* of such an object.
Moreover, as I recall there is more than a little controversy as to whether supermassive black holes could actually form and grow in a manner consistent with prevailing theory, as opposed to having been formed in the early moments of our universe, or through some yet-to-be-theorized process. And if the biggest candidates couldn't actually form according to our theories, then I see no reason to assume their much smaller bretheren couldn't be formed throgh the same alternate process, whatever that might be.
It could even be, as the headline deceptively states, that back holes don't actually exist and our candidate objects are something else that only superficially resembles them at phenominal distances, but that certainly wouldn't be my first assumption.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Let's look out 50k ly. We can see that something incredibly massive is sitting in an incredibly tiny region of space. We don't see stars there. In fact, we observe some x-ray bursts, which are consistent with models of an accretion disk. We also know the upper limit on the volume this mass resides in: Something about the size of our solar system. We know this because we can actually image that resolution at that distance - aka, we can see it. Do we see a black hole? No, but then again, those are almost impossible to image directly. Instead, you observe local effects, like gravitational lensing (http://arxiv.org/abs/1204.2103).
I would surmise that this paper is going to have a hard time in the peer review process unless it accounts for invisible, ultra-dense objects of some kind.
Sooooo its something of huge mass that pulls things in like they're falling down a hole and it emits no light and therefore would appear to be black.
Why can't we call this thing a black hole again?
But I believe this paper isn't disproving that. I think its saying all of that mass doesn't go to a point of infinite density, due to other known phenomena that keep it from happening.
Sensationalist? What are you talking about?
Not peer-reviewed? Mersini-Houghton's results were published this month in Physics Letters B, Backreaction of Hawking radiation on a gravitationally collapsing star I: Black holes? I don't expect you to read the existing literature, but the least you can do is check the indices to see if it exists.
They'll say "What the carnations is that apostrophe doing there? It's not even a plural!"
Saints preserve us.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."