Los Alamos Researcher Says "Black Holes" Aren't Holes At All

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M., April 21, 2002 - Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory and the University of South Carolina have provided a hypothesis that "black holes" in space are not holes at all, but instead are more akin to bubbles.
Researcher Emil Mottola of Los Alamos' Theoretical Division today presented a new explanation for black holes at the American Physical Society annual meeting in Albuquerque, N.M. Pawel Mazur of the University of South Carolina is Mottola's co-author. The researchers' explanation redefines black holes not as "holes" in space where matter and light inexplicably disappear into another dimension, but rather as spherical voids surrounded by an extremely durable form of matter never before experienced on Earth. Mazur and Mottola call the extraordinary objects Gravastars.

The Gravastar explanation for black holes helps provide answers to some of the daunting questions raised by traditional black-hole descriptions. Based on earlier-held astrophysical explanations, black holes form in space when stars reach the end of their lives and collapse in on themselves. According to black hole theory, the matter from these dying stars occupies a tiny amount of space - a mere pinpoint - and creates a mind-boggling gravitational field so powerful that nothing can escape, not even light.

Mottola and Pawel suggest that while some degree of collapsing does take place in a dying star, the collapse proceeds only to a certain point. At that point, the intense gravity of the dying star transforms the star's matter into an entirely new phase. Mottolla describes this phase as similar to a Bose-Einstein condensate, a phase of matter recently observed in a laboratory setting and the subject of scientific excitement in the past few years.

On Earth, a Bose-Einstein condensate forms when matter is plunged to very low temperatures approaching Absolute Zero, the theoretical temperature at which all atomic motion - the motion of electrons, protons and all other subatomic particles within an individual atom - is believed to cease. When matter is cooled sufficiently to become a Bose-Einstein condensate, the atoms that make up the matter enter a strange new phase. The atoms all reach the same energy state, or quantum state, and they coalesce into a blob of material called a "super atom." The properties of Bose-Einstein condensates are the subject of intense study and many physicists are working to understand them.

Mottola and Mazur believe that dying stars collapse to the "Event Horizon" - in essence the point of no return for objects entering the gravitational field of a black hole. At this point, the matter in the dying star transforms to a new state of matter that forms a Gravastar. According to the two researchers, the dying star's matter creates an ultra-thin, ultra-cold, ultra-dark shell of material that is virtually indestructible. The new form of gravitational energy in the interior is akin to a Bose-Einstien condensate, although it appears on the inside to be a bubble of vacuum, hence the term Gra (vitational) Va (cuum) Star, or Gravastar.

"Since this new form of matter is very durable, but somewhat flexible, like a bubble, anything that became trapped by its intense gravity and smashed into it would be obliterated and then assimilated into the shell of the Gravastar," Mottola said. "However, any matter in the vicinity that fell onto the surface could be re-emitted as another form of energy, which would make Gravastars potentially much more powerful emitters of radiation than black holes, which simply swallow the material."

The space trapped inside the Gravastar's shell is a similarly uncanny conceptually. The interior of the Gravastar would be totally warped space-time (the traditional three dimensions plus time). According to the researchers, this interior space would exert an outward force on the shell, adding to its durability.

Although unconventional, Mottola and Mazur's Gravastar explanation for black holes does solve at least one serious quandary created by black hole theory. Under a black-hole scenario, the amount of entropy created in a black hole would become nearly infinite. 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.

Mottola and Mazur continue to refine their theory and are working on a concept behind rotating Gravastars. They even suggest that the universe we now know and live in may be the interior of a Gravastar.

"These are fascinating concepts to think about," Mottola said. "I look forward to exploring this hypothesis further."

Los Alamos National Laboratory is operated by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy.

For more Los Alamos news releases, visit World Wide Web site http://www.lanl.gov/external/news/releases


Editor's Note: The original news release can be found at http://www.lanl.gov/worldview/news/releases/archive/02-035.shtml

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Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Los Alamos National Laboratory for journalists and other members of the public. If you wish to quote from any part of this story, please credit Los Alamos National Laboratory as the original source. You may also wish to include the following link in any citation:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/04/020423075643.htm

Wow, that's cool. A sphere and not a hole. Cool, crazy shit. It kind of goes along with my infinite worlds theory and infinite times. If this universe we live in is actually a Gravastar and it itself contains an as yet unnumbered amount of Gravastars, well then. Huh, Crazy. Thanks for the links too. It's going to give me a lot to think about.

Glad you liked it. For what it's worth, your thread was running through my mind as I read it.

Nox

Very interesting. Makes sense to me, especially since I have the idea that EVERYTHING is spherical. Right-o..

I thought modern science defined black wholes as areas of such a gravatic pull that nothing could escape from them, and that nothing really disapeared, it was just held tightly?

that's not new.

hawking realized this years ago, the term black hole stuck because of the way we observe it.

traditional views of black holes stem from science fiction not science.

the star does become a singularity, the matter it consumes was never thought to disappear from the universe, the mass is constant and it has to be or the universe would be unstable and not have existed for very long.

the matter is revolving around the singularity, as more matter is gathered the event horizon expands. and it becomes larger, the initial singularity though remains constant.

this effect is easily viewed from hubble photographs of sirius a and b, available somewhere in the nasa.com photo archive.

you can clearly see the gasses of sirius a being pulled from the star to a central point that sirius a revolves, and through observation this central point has been seen to expand.

proving hawkings theories from the 80's in the early 90's.

they didn't make some fascinating discovery, they just want to rename it.

"However, any matter in the vicinity that fell onto the surface could be re-emitted as another form of energy, which would make Gravastars potentially much more powerful emitters of radiation than black holes, which simply swallow the material."

this is from hawkings book a brief history of time published in 1988, chapter 7, black ain't so black, page 105.

"How is it possible that a black hole appears to emit particles when we know nothing can escape from within its event horizon? the answer quantum theory tells us, is that particles do not come from within the black hole, but from the "empty" space just outside the black holes event horizon! We can understand this in the following way: What we think of as empty space cannot be completely empty because that would mean that all the fields, such as gravitational and electromagnetic, would have to be exactly zero. however, the value of a field adn its rate of change with time are like the position and and velocity of a particle: the uncertainty principle implies that the more accurately one knows one of these quantities, the less accurately one can know the other. So in empty space the field cannot be fixed at exactly zero, because it would have both a precise value and precise rate of change, both zero."

later in the chapter hawking dates this work as occuring in 1974.

"Mottola and Mazur continue to refine their theory and are working on a concept behind rotating Gravastars. They even suggest that the universe we now know and live in may be the interior of a Gravastar. "

hawking theorizes the same thing.

that was published in science daily?

you'd think they'd be aware of hawkings work and realize that this was all theorized almost 30 years ago.