Are black holes made of black energy?

Two researchers from the University of Hawaii at Manoa have identified and corrected a subtle mistake made when applying Einstein's equations to model the growth of the universe.

Physicists generally assume that a large system cosmologically, such as the universe, is insensitive to the details of the small systems that it contains. Kevin Croker, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, and Joel Weiner, a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics, have shown that this hypothesis may fail for compact objects that remain after the collapse and fallout. Explosion of very large stars. .

"For 80 years, we have generally been operating assuming that the universe, in broad outline, was not affected by the particular details of a small area," Croker said. "It is now clear that general relativity can observably link collapsed stars – regions of Honolulu's size – to the behavior of the universe as a whole, more than a trillion trillion times" .

Croker and Weiner have shown that the rate of growth of the universe can become sensitive to the average contribution of these compact objects. Likewise, the objects themselves can be related to the growth of the universe, gaining or losing energy depending on the composition of the objects. This result is significant because it reveals unexpected links between cosmological physics and compact object physics, leading to many new observational predictions.

One of the consequences of this study is that the growth rate of the universe provides information on what happens to the stars at the end of their lives. Astronomers generally assume that large stars form black holes when they die, but this is not the only possible outcome. In 1966, Erast Gliner, a young physicist from the Institute of Physico-Technical Ioffe of Leningrad, proposed an alternative hypothesis according to which the very big stars should collapse in what could be called generic objects of energy. black (GEODE). They seem to be black holes seen from the outside, but, unlike black holes, they contain black energy instead of a singularity.

In 1998, two teams of independent astronomers discovered that the expansion of the Universe was accelerating, which is consistent with the presence of a uniform supply of energy black. However, it was not recognized that GEODEs could contribute in this way. With corrected formalism, Croker and Weiner have shown that if a fraction of the older stars would collapse in GEODE, instead of black holes, their average contribution today would naturally produce uniform dark energy. required.

The results of this study also apply to colliding double – star systems observable by gravitational waves by the LIGO – Virgo collaboration. In 2016, LIGO announced the first observation of what appeared to be a colliding double-hole black system. Such systems were supposed to exist, but the pair of objects was surprisingly heavy – about 5 times larger than the mass of black holes predicted by computer simulations. Using the corrected formalism, Croker and Weiner wondered if LIGO-Virgo observed double GEODE collisions instead of double black-hole collisions. They discovered that GEODEs grow with the universe during the period before such collisions. When the collisions occur, the resulting GEODE masses become 4 to 8 times larger, which corresponds approximately to the LIGO-Virgo observations.

Croker and Weiner were careful to separate their theoretical result from the GEODE scenario's observation support, pointing out that "black holes are certainly not dead." What we've shown is that if the GEODEs exist, they can easily give rise to observed phenomena currently lacks convincing explanations.We anticipate many other consequences of a GEODE scenario in terms of observation, including many ways to exclude it.

The study, Implications of symmetry and pressures in Friedmann's cosmology: I. The formalism, is published in the August 28, 2019 issue of Astrophysical Journal and is available online.