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from the two-steps-forward-and-there's-no-turning-back dept.
Are black holes the ruthless killers we’ve made them out to be? Samir Mathur says no. According to the professor of physics at Ohio State University, the recently-proposed idea that black holes have “firewalls” that destroy all they touch has a loophole.
In a paper posted online to the arXiv preprint server, Mathur takes issue with the firewall theory, and proves mathematically that black holes are not necessarily arbiters of doom. In fact, he says the world could be captured by a black hole, and we wouldn’t even notice.
More than a decade ago, Mathur used the principles of string theory to show that black holes are actually tangled-up balls of cosmic strings. His “fuzzball theory” helped resolve certain contradictions in how physicists think of black holes.
But when a group of researchers recently tried to build on Mathur’s theory, they concluded that the surface of the fuzzball was actually a firewall.
According to the firewall theory, the surface of the fuzzball is deadly. In fact, the idea is called the firewall theory because it suggests that a very literal fiery death awaits anything that touches it.
Mathur and his team have been expanding on their fuzzball theory, too, and they’ve come to a completely different conclusion. They see black holes not as killers, but rather as benign copy machines of a sort.
https://news.osu.edu/news/2015/06/16/fuzzyhologram/
Original Submission
(Score: 1) by budgenator on Thursday June 18 2015, @09:44PM
I always assumed that anything inside the event horizon, was undefined from the outside, well anything other than mass, charge and angular momentum. What interesting to me is when two blackholes approach each other and the event horizons distort from the other's gravity, possibly enough for a larger singularity to cause a small singularity to become naked.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday June 18 2015, @10:50PM
Even if it doesn't become naked, it's still weird.
You'd have two event horizons (defining singularities at their centers) which suddenly become one and deny info about what happens inside.
Including the fact that the geometry of the ensemble during the transition is non-spherical?
In their way to becoming one big blackhole, the variation of mass density inside the envelope of the resulting event horizon would surely produce gravitational waves, but they can't escape. So, what happens with the shape of the event horizon as seen from outside - does it stays the same as at the moment of collision? Or can the observer feel the redistribution of mass by observing the shape of the horizon, thus have information "escaping" it?
Suppose the two blackholes are rotating; the angular momentum of the resulting blackhole - after reaching equilibrium - changes (it will change even if not initially rotating, if the collision is not dead-centre). As such, frame dragging [wikipedia.org] changes. But what happens during the time of the collision with frame-dragging?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford