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John Wiley Price, be still: UNC says black holes don't exist, at least mathematically

Posted by Olog-hai on Wed Sep 24 16:07:28 2014, in response to black hole is now a racist phase, posted by Dand124 on Thu Jul 10 18:24:12 2008.

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There Are No Such Things As Black Holes

By Jason Major on September 24, 2014

That’s the conclusion reached by one researcher from the University of North Carolina: black holes can’t exist in our Universe — not mathematically, anyway.

“I’m still not over the shock,” said Laura Mersini-Houghton, associate physics professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. “We’ve been studying this problem for a more than 50 years and this solution gives us a lot to think about.”

In a news article spotlighted by UNC, the scenario suggested by Mersini-Houghton is briefly explained. Basically, when a massive star reaches the end of its life and collapses under its own gravity after blasting its outer layers into space — which is commonly thought to result in an ultra-dense point called a singularity surrounded by a light- and energy-trapping event horizon — it undergoes a period of intense outgoing radiation (the sort of which was famously deduced by Stephen Hawking.) This release of radiation is enough, Mersini-Houghton has calculated, to cause the collapsing star to lose too much mass to allow a singularity to form. No singularity means no event horizon… and no black hole.

At least, not by her numbers.

So what happens to massive stars when they die? Rather than falling ever inwards to create an infinitely dense point hidden behind a space-time “firewall” — something that, while fascinating to ponder and a staple of science fiction, has been notoriously tricky for scientists to reconcile with known physics — Mersini-Houghton suggests that they just “probably blow up.”

According to the UNC article, Mersini-Houghton’s research “not only forces scientists to re-imagine the fabric of space-time, but also rethink the origins of the universe.” . . .

Don’t believe it? I’m not surprised. I’m certainly no physicist but I do expect that there will be many scientists (and layfolk) who’ll have their own take on Mersini-Houghton’s findings (*ahem* Brian Koberlein) especially considering:

1. the popularity of black holes in our astronomical culture, and
2. the many — scratch that; the countless — observations that have been made on quite black hole-ish objects found throughout the Universe.

So what do you think? Have black holes just been voted off the cosmic island? Or are the holes more likely in the research?

(Then of course this leads me to wonder, if there really are no black holes, then what’s causing the stars in the center of our galaxy to move like this?)

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