Black holes might end their lives by transforming into their exact opposite - 'white holes' that explosively pour all the material they ever swallowed into space, say two physicists. The suggestion, based on a speculative quantum theory of gravity, could solve a long-standing conundrum about whether black holes destroy information.
The theory suggests that the transition from black hole to white hole would take place right after the initial formation of the black hole, but because gravity dilates time, outside observers would see the black hole lasting billions or trillions of years or more, depending on its size. If the authors are correct, tiny black holes that formed during the very early history of the Universe would now be ready to pop off like firecrackers and might be detected as high-energy cosmic rays or other radiation. In fact, they say, their work could imply that some of the dramatic flares commonly considered to be supernova explosions could in fact be the dying throes of tiny black holes that formed shortly after the Big Bang.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MagnaZee on Sunday July 20 2014, @02:07AM
The article seems to imply that this theory does not preclude the action of Hawking radiation. And so, this seems to imply that some of the information absorbed would be destroyed due to Hawking radiation. So, this isn't really a solution to the apparent problem of information destruction.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 20 2014, @02:15AM
Isn't this exactly what Stephen Hawking said would happen to black holes when Hawking radiation made them sufficiently small? Granted, he was very tentative when talking about this in A Brief History of Time and I suppose the scientists behind this new hypothesis must have some pretty solid maths to back it up this time. I remember reading there that he wrote that it wasn't clear what happened to them when they got sufficiently small, but thought that might explode in a massive shower of radiation or something like that.
(Score: 4, Funny) by davester666 on Sunday July 20 2014, @02:17AM
Ugh. Just the idea of black holes vomiting everywhere just grosses me out.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 20 2014, @11:30AM
Don't worry, if it's close enough for you to worry about it'll be too close for you to worry about.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by martyb on Sunday July 20 2014, @02:30AM
From the summary:
The earth is barely a small blot compared to the size of the sun. Our sun is just one of, what, 100 million(?) 1 billion(?) stars in our galaxy? And a tiny black hole going white might outshine *all* of that?
What would you get when a "regular" mass black hole goes off? And then imagine when a super-massive black hole goes off.
I don't know about you, but I sure find these results to be mind-boggling. And quite humbling, too. In the grand scheme of things, I'm just a microscopic cosmic grain of sand.
Wit is intellect, dancing. I'm too old to act my age. Life is too important to take myself seriously.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 20 2014, @03:04AM
I believe stars in the Milky Way are between 100 and 400 billion
(Score: 2) by tibman on Sunday July 20 2014, @03:27AM
There is a similar plot-line in the Ringworld book series. *spoilers* The galactic core, a dense mix of stars, is having a chain reaction supernova. Radiation wouldn't arrive to earth for over 20,000 years. Humans seem to just shrug off the news. Not every race takes it so easily though : )
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 20 2014, @05:11AM
And then they are probably wrong, since their ideas is based on speculation.
FYI, there are plenty more stars in our galaxy than 1 billion. There are more than 1 billion sun-like stars in similar distance from galactic center as our star. If anything, that is food for thought.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way [wikipedia.org]
"I don't know about you, but I sure find these results to be mind-boggling. And quite humbling, too. In the grand scheme of things, I'm just a microscopic cosmic grain of sand."
Power of 10 - much more mind-boggling for me - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0 [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Sunday July 20 2014, @06:31AM
The size of an earth-mass black hole is about a centimeter. That's certainly small. On the other hand, the energy corresponding to the earth's mass is more than 5*10^61 Joule. That's about 10^18 times the total energy the sun would have emitted if it had been shining as bright as today since the big bang.
Since energy is proportional to mass, and black hole mass is proportional to black hole surface area, and thus to the square of the radius, this means that a black hole of 10 picometers (that's about 1/100 of the size of an atom, and therefore would certainly qualify as tiny) would still contain the energy the sun would have radiated since the big bang.
Note that since an exploding black hole would vanish completely in the process, all its energy would be released.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by martyb on Sunday July 20 2014, @12:27PM
Thanks for the info — I find those numbers to be absolutely mind-boggling!
I have a question, though, concerning your statement:
I thought mass is proportional to volume, which in turn is proportional to the cube of the radius. I'll not argue that it is of any real significance in this case; even if it changed from picometers to nanometers or even millimeters, it would still be absolutely tiny in astronomical terms.
Thought experiment:
I've seen reports that, for a period of time, a single supernova can outshine its host galaxy. Let's take that to an extreme. How massive would a black hole have to be so that when it went "white", it released as much energy as is currently released by the observable universe [wikipedia.org]?
Take an estimate of the number of galaxies in the observable universe: 170 billion galaxies [wolframalpha.com] and an estimate of the number of stars in each galaxy: 100 billion stars [wikipedia.org] per galaxy.
Now taking the average stellar luminosity [wikipedia.org] along with an average for the amount of energy radiated by each star, one could construct a rough estimate of the amount of energy being radiated in the universe. Okay, so there is a *huge* variation in the stellar luminosity, and a wide distribution in the numbers of each type of star in the universe. See: Hertzsprung–Russell diagram [wikipedia.org]. How does one reconcile those?
In my search for an answer to *that* question, I discovered that I'm not the first to consider such a thing and came upon this paper On the stellar luminosity of the universe [arxiv.org] wherein it is found that the luminosity of the universe is approximately c**5/G which evaluates to 3.7 x 10e59 erg / sec.
As luminosity is proportional to time, there is an obvious dependency on how long one estimates it would take for a black hole to transition to a white hole. At this point, my conjecture reaches the end of my ability to calculate it.
So, just how massive a black hole would be required for its transition to a white hole to exceed the luminosity of the entire observable universe?
Wit is intellect, dancing. I'm too old to act my age. Life is too important to take myself seriously.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Sunday July 20 2014, @03:40PM
For normal matter, the size is determined by the volume the atoms occupy, which for solids is mostly determined by the number of atoms (gas planets are already different because larger planets mean higher pressure inside means higher density inside means mass grows faster with volume).
However the size of a black hole is not the size of the matter which makes it up (that would be zero, since the matter vanishes in the singularity in its center), but the size of the event horizon, that is the border where due to the gravitation no light can escape (that is, where the escape velocity reaches the speed of light). And that radius goes with the square of the mass.
About the time of the conversion process: I can't access the article, so I don't know (assuming the article gives that time). But it being a fundamental process, I could imagine that it is something like a Planck mass converted in a Planck time, which would make the power released of the order of the Planck power, which according to Wikipedia is 3.6*10^52 W.
Now 3.7*10^59 erg/s are 3.7*10^52 W. Which is indeed almost exactly the Planck power.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by Freebirth Toad on Tuesday July 22 2014, @07:23PM
They provide a link to the preprint [arxiv.org] in the article.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Sunday July 20 2014, @03:17AM
Did anyone read Flatland in college? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland) Mathematically we can deal with multiple dimensions, but in reality we only see a small portion anything existing in more than 3 dimensions.
The Musk/Trump interview appears to have been hacked, but not a DDOS hack...more like A Distributed Denial of Reality.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Sunday July 20 2014, @02:18PM
How does that relate to this story?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Sunday July 20 2014, @04:43PM
I would think that this crowd could easily flex their imagination and see that what we see as energy (information) disappearing into a black hole, may actually be flowing into another dimension. Or maybe an event that exists in more dimensions than we can perceive from our viewpoint.
The Musk/Trump interview appears to have been hacked, but not a DDOS hack...more like A Distributed Denial of Reality.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 20 2014, @04:11PM
No, I read it in middle school.
(Score: 2) by prospectacle on Sunday July 20 2014, @04:15AM
.. would end up behaving like a new big bang? Or to put it another way, does it mean that our big bang could have come from a particularly large black hole that ate the previous generation of galaxies?
I don't know anything much about physics so please feel free to point out why this theory makes no sense. It has long seemed to me (ignorant as I am about the subject), to be a neat simple explanation of where the big bang came from (although previously I thought maybe it was two big black holes smashing into each other such that they exceeded some critical mass).
If a plan isn't flexible it isn't realistic
(Score: 2) by lx on Sunday July 20 2014, @05:24AM
Some cosmologists think that that is the case. [nationalgeographic.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by azrael on Sunday July 20 2014, @09:05AM
I've never seen one before - no one has - but I'm guessing it's a white hole.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. A black hole sucks time and matter out of the Universe; a white hole returns it.
(Score: 4, Funny) by prospectacle on Sunday July 20 2014, @11:25AM
So what is it?
If a plan isn't flexible it isn't realistic
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Sunday July 20 2014, @03:33PM
This is going to be about waffles, isn't it?
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday July 21 2014, @08:36AM
+1 Smeggie. Leaving thread satisfied.
(Score: 2) by azrael on Monday July 21 2014, @02:10PM
with how many RD references I throw into the department field of the stories I post this just HAD to be done, could not resist! Now you, prospectacle and opinionated_science are my favourite people :D
(Score: 2) by zeigerpuppy on Sunday July 20 2014, @01:34PM
I wasn't expecting verification so quickly!
http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=2132&cid=50017 [soylentnews.org]