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Physicist Claims Black Holes Mathematically Don't Exist

Posted by Soulskill on from the plot-twist dept.

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 While the arXiv paper with the exact solution has not yet been peer reviewed, the preceding paper by Mersini-Houghton with the approximate solutions was published in Physics Letters B.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."

4 of 356 comments (clear)

  1. Hmmm ... by gstoddart · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So, what are those big honking things seeing?

    Is this a case where something has been mathematically proven to not exist after it's been observationally confirmed?

    --
    Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    1. Re:Hmmm ... by i+kan+reed · · Score: 5, Interesting

      And there's also a reallllllllllllly telling quote in the actual paper I'm still reading to make sure I understood the context right, but,

      Consider a spherically symmetric, uniform density, perfect-fluid star, undergoing gravitational collapse. The stress energy tensor of the fluid is ...

      Looks like a hell of assumption to make about stellar density. We know the cores are way more dense than the rest of the star, that's the magic that makes the fusion happen.

      Now if this assumption is qualified and addressed later in the paper, I'll be guilty of not being careful enough, but I haven't found that clue yet.

    2. Re:Hmmm ... by medv4380 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Since Hawking Radiation hasn't been observed in any repeatable experiment, and the universe is too warm to tell it apart from the background radiation if black holes do emit it I'd say that the assumptions could be wrong. Since the claim is that the event horizon never forms it's claiming that those black things in the center of galaxies don't exist, or should be just above the minimum to be a black hole. I'd say this is actually a hit against Hawking Radiation, or one of the other assumption, and not a hit against Black Holes.

  2. That's not what she's saying by Lucas123 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    She's not saying the things are not "very very dense" rather just that they never collapse further than the state that gravity can overcome the speed of light. I believe she's saying a black hole's mass would be "evenly" (or not) spread out over the volume encompassed by the event horizon, rather than in a singularity.