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Black holes, those gravitational monsters so named because no light can escape their clutches, are by far the most mysterious objects in the universe.
But a new theory proposes that black holes are not black at all. Rather, these black holes may be dark stars harboring exotic physics within them, according to a new study. This mysterious new physics can cause these dark stars to emit a strange type of radiation; this radiation could in turn explain all the mysterious dark matter in the universe, which shoots everything but emits no light.
Related: The 11 biggest unanswered questions about dark matter
Dark stars
Thanks to Einstein’s theory on general relativity, which describes how matter distorts spacetime, we know that some massive stars can collapse on themselves to such an extent that they keep collapsing, shrinking into an infinitely small point – a singularity.
Once the singularity is formed, it surrounds itself with an event horizon. It is the ultimate one-way street in the universe. On the event horizon, the black hole’s gravitational pull is so strong that to leave, you have to travel faster than light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is totally prohibited, anything that crosses the threshold is doomed forever.
Therefore, a black hole.
These simple but surprising statements have held back decades of observations. Astronomers have seen a star’s atmosphere suck into a black hole. They saw stars orbiting black holes. Physicists on Earth have heard the gravitational waves emitted when black holes collide. We even took a photo of a black hole’s “shadow” – the hole it digs in the glow of surrounding gas.
Related: The 12 strangest objects in the universe
And yet, the mysteries remain at the very heart of black hole science. The very property that defines a black hole – the singularity – appears to be physically impossible, as matter cannot actually collapse to an infinitely small point.
Planck motors
This means that the current understanding of black holes will eventually need to be updated or replaced with something else that can explain what is at the center of a black hole.
But that doesn’t stop physicists from trying.
A black hole singularity theory replaces these infinitely tiny dots of infinitely compressed matter with something much more palatable: an insanely tiny dot of incredibly compressed matter. matter. This is called a Planck kernel, because the idea theorizes that the matter inside a black hole is compressed to the smallest possible scale, the Planck length, which is 1 , 6 * 10 ^ minus 35 meters.
It is little.
With a Planck nucleus, which would not be a singularity, a black hole would no longer host an event horizon – there would be no place where gravitational pull exceeded the speed of light. But to outside observers, the gravitational pull would be so strong that it would look and act like an event horizon. Only extremely sensitive observations, for which we do not yet have the technology, could make the difference.
Black matter
Radical problems require radical solutions, and therefore replacing “singularity” with “Planck kernel” is not so far-fetched, even if the theory is little more than a faint sketch of an outline, without physics or mathematics to confidently describe this kind of environment. In other words, Planck’s kernels are the physical equivalent of spitting ideas.
This is a useful thing to do, because singularities require serious and original thinking. And there could be additional side effects. Like, for example, explaining the mystery of dark matter.
Dark matter makes up 85% of the mass of the universe, yet it never interacts with light. We can only determine its existence by its gravitational effects on normal and luminous matter. For example, we can observe stars orbiting the centers of galaxies and use their orbital speeds to calculate the total mass of those galaxies.
In a new article, submitted Feb.15 to the Preprint Database arXiv, physicist Igor Nikitin of the Fraunhofer Institute for Scientific Algorithms and Computing in Germany takes the idea of ”radical singularity” and takes it a step further. According to the article, Planck’s nuclei can emit particles (because there is no event horizon, these black holes are not completely black). These particles can be familiar or new.
Maybe it would be some form of particle that could explain dark matter. If black holes are truly Planck stars, Nikitin wrote, and constantly emit a flow of dark matter, they could explain the motions of stars in galaxies.
his idea is unlikely to stand up to closer examination (there is much more evidence for the existence of dark matter than just its effect on the movement of stars). But it’s a great example of how we need to come up with as many ideas as possible to explain black holes, because we never know what links there may be to other unsolved mysteries in the universe.
Originally posted on Live Science.
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