March 31, 2005

ANY THEORY THAT SOUNDS NONSENSICAL ENOUGH IS:

Black holes 'do not exist': These mysterious objects are dark-energy stars, physicist claims. (Philip Ball, 3/31/05, Nature)

Black holes are staples of science fiction and many think astronomers have observed them indirectly. But according to a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, these awesome breaches in space-time do not and indeed cannot exist.

Over the past few years, observations of the motions of galaxies have shown that some 70% the Universe seems to be composed of a strange 'dark energy' that is driving the Universe's accelerating expansion.

George Chapline thinks that the collapse of the massive stars, which was long believed to generate black holes, actually leads to the formation of stars that contain dark energy. "It's a near certainty that black holes don't exist," he claims.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 31, 2005 8:10 PM
Comments

I think it would be more precise to say that, according to Chapline, black holes don't contain singularities.

A black hole is just a region of space from which the escape velocity is greater than the speed of light. Even Newtonian physics allowed for such a thing. Different theories will give different predictions as to the behavior of black holes. It seems likely that they will all be weird, though.

But "Black holes don't contain singularities" isn't as snappy a headline.

Posted by: Bob Hawkins at March 31, 2005 8:58 PM

Black holes are less mysterious than these dark energy containing stars. He's replacing an oddity with a mystery.

Posted by: pj at March 31, 2005 10:18 PM

Bob: I think he is saying something entirely different than black holes lack a singularity.

"Outside the 'surface' of a dark-energy star, it behaves much like a black hole, producing a strong gravitational tug. But inside, the 'negative' gravity of dark energy may cause matter to bounce back out again."

As I understand that statement, there really is no event horizon (else nothing could escape), but instead the "surface" is some boundary between positive and negative gravity. I find it ironic that quantum mechanics, which can not account for gravitation, is then used to predict "negative" gravitation. This strikes me as yet another example of the incompatibility of general relativity and quantum mechanics.

Posted by: jd watson at March 31, 2005 10:19 PM

these are the same guys who have been wrong since aristotle. why anyone gives them print space or air time is the real mystery of the cosmos.

Posted by: cjm at April 1, 2005 1:29 AM
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