Is the existence of black holes proven? American researcher proves that there are no black holes

09.02.2022

Do you see a black hole?
- Not.
- And she is not.

Something like this dialogue could take place between an astronomer and physics professor Laura Marcini-Houghton of the University of North Carolina, who made a sensational statement. Female mathematically proved that such astrophysical objects as black holes simply cannot exist in nature.

The catch is that no one can prove the opposite at the moment.

Black holes - a term popularized half a century ago by an American theorist - are supermassive relativistic objects, the existence of which underlies many astrophysical theories describing the evolution of galaxies, stars, quasars. And although today their existence is not in doubt among most astronomers, formally these objects are considered hypothetical.

Since these objects neither emit their own light nor reflect alien light, their presence can only be determined by indirect methods. So, scientists are convinced of their existence by the rapid rotation of stars near the centers of galaxies and the deflection of light rays (lensing), which is observed in the vicinity of these strongly gravitating objects.

Astronomers are aware of two types of black holes - stellar-mass black holes and supermassive black holes with a mass of billions of solar masses.

There is a debate about the existence of black holes of intermediate masses. It is believed that the first type is formed during the collapse of massive stars, when a star, having swelled up, sheds its outer layers and collapses inward under the influence of its own gravity. The origin of supermassive black holes causes controversy among astronomers: whether they were formed simultaneously with the Universe in clots of dark matter, or during the collapse of large gas clouds.

The same thing will happen if the Earth is compressed to the size of a walnut: its density will increase so much

that no body can break away from its surface, even moving at the speed of light.

The main characteristic of a black hole is the size of its event horizon - an imaginary surface beyond which neither the body nor the information can get back. The beauty of black holes is that they oppose two fundamental physical theories to each other - Einstein's theory of gravity, from which the possibility of their existence follows, and quantum theory, which postulates that no information in the Universe can disappear anywhere.

In 1974, renowned British scientist Stephen predicted that black holes should evaporate. Quantum theory says that particle-antiparticle pairs are constantly born in the physical vacuum. At the same time, the birth of such pairs near the event horizon allows for the possibility that one particle will fall into the black hole, while the other will not. Thus, the escaped particles can carry away a lot of holes due to the so-called Hawking radiation.

It is noteworthy that Hawking put forward his theory shortly after he met in Moscow in 1973 with Soviet physicists Yakov Zeldovich and Alexei Starobinsky.

They convinced Hawking that a spinning black hole could emit electromagnetic waves and particles.

Marcini-Houghton mathematically described the process of collapse of massive stars and came to a paradox. Her calculations showed that when a star collapses, Hawking radiation occurs, which causes the star to rapidly lose its mass.

And so rapidly that the density of the inner regions ceases to grow and the formation of a black hole stops.

“I myself can not recover from the shock. We have been studying this problem for more than 50 years, and this decision gives us a lot to think about,” said the researcher.

What actually remains in place of massive stars can be revealed by further observations. Explosions of massive stars have already been observed in recent history, so, in 1987, astronomers observed the brightest supernova SN 1987A. However, neither a black hole nor a neutron star in its place has yet been discovered.

The academician has previously expressed his opinion on this topic.

“I expect that in the next decade there will be a Nobel Prize for the discovery of black holes. We are getting closer and closer to this. First, these black holes are already like uncut dogs. For stellar black holes - 23 pieces (Now there are dozens of them.), — masses are measured for them, restrictions on sizes are given. And there are already many thousands of supermassive black holes in the cores of galaxies,” the scientist said.

Black holes are areas of dense matter in space that have such a strong attraction that no objects caught in the black hole's gravitational field can leave it. Black holes attract even the light that passes by. What science thinks about the existence of black holes will be discussed in our article.

The boundaries of black holes are called the "event horizon", and its magnitude is called the "gravitational radius".

Black holes, like many other physical phenomena, were first discovered only in theory. The possibility of their existence follows from some of Einstein's equations, they converge with the theory of gravity (but it is not known how true it is), which, again theoretically, confirms their existence.

In our time, the possibility of the formation of black holes is confirmed by the experimentally verified general theory of relativity (GR). New data appear regularly, which are analyzed and interpreted within the framework of the above theory, which confirms the existence of some astronomical objects that partially coincide with the signs of black holes with a mass of 105-1010 solar masses. Therefore, it is impossible to prepare for the 100% existence of black holes.

To date, there are 2 realistic and 2 hypothetical options for creating black holes: catastrophically fast compression of a massive star or the center of a part of a galaxy; and, accordingly, the creation of black holes as a consequence of the Big Bang and the emergence of high energies in nuclear reactions.

There are objects that are called black holes simply because of the similarity of some of their properties with black holes, for example, stars that are in the last stage of gravitational collapse. Modern astrophysics does not attach much importance to this difference, since the observed manifestations of an “almost collapsed” star and a theoretically “real” black hole are almost identical.

Black holes are not eternal. At first glance, it seems that these objects only draw in everything around them, but according to the quantum theory of gravity, a black hole, absorbing, must continuously radiate, losing its energy. The more "energy-mass" is lost, the greater the temperature and speed of radiation, which ultimately leads to an explosion. It remains that then from a black hole or not, it is not known, but the answer to this question will be given by the quantum theory of gravity, on which they are going to work hard in the next couple of decades.

Three theories for the existence of black holes

There are three interesting theories about the existence of black holes:

There are a finite number of black holes in the Universe, they are in every galaxy, therefore, they can be a way to move in space, a kind of teleport - you went into this black hole, left another. Moreover, you can “regulate” not only the place you get to, but also the time.

According to Hugh Everett's theory of many worlds, the number of universes is infinite. Thanks to this, a hypothesis arose that black holes are a passage to another universe. The physical laws in all Universes may differ, but only the points of passage - black holes - are unshakable, though not eternal.

Black holes absorb everything in the gravitational field. If a person falls into a black hole - an internal observer, and someone watches him - an external observer, then in theory the following situation can happen: a person falling into a black hole will see how time slows down for him and stops for eternity, and " surrounding time, according to the theory of the English mathematician and theoretical physicist Penrose, the time of the development of the Universe, increases at such a speed that he, an internal observer, manages to see the collapse of our space, and all existing realities, and all objects that once got caught into a black hole. From the point of view of an external observer, the internal one will fly up to the black hole and stop, as if waiting for something. The universe, according to the theory, does not allow the existence of internal and external observers at the same time. After a minute of the subjective time of a person jumping into a black hole, but after billions of years from the point of view of an external observer, the falling one will be surprised to see how his very aged “external” friends begin to fall into his hole, and his “native” black hole begins to merge with everyone other black holes… Consequently, all external observers will become internal at the same time, and now they all fly together towards the Collapse of the Universe.

Given the above facts of the existence of black holes, there are those who refute them. Physics professor Laura Marcini-Houghton of North Carolina argues that black holes simply cannot exist. She argues that there is no direct evidence of their existence, and indirect evidence may be erroneous. However, this is just a theory for now.

At this stage of development, science is unable to either confirm or disprove the existence of black holes. It remains to wait for new observations, their analysis and some subsequent answers to these questions.

The event horizon of a black hole refers to the point of no return when approaching a black hole. In Einstein's general theory of relativity, the event horizon is a place where space and time are so warped by gravity that you can never leave. When you cross the event horizon, you can only move inward, never outward. However, the one-sided event horizon leads to what is known as the information paradox.

The information paradox originates in thermodynamics, in particular, in its second law. In its simplest form, it can be explained as "heat is transferred from a hot body to a cold one". But the law is more useful when expressed in terms of entropy. Thus, it is formulated as "the entropy of the system cannot decrease". Many people interpret entropy as the level of disorder in a system, or an unusable part of a system. This would mean that things should always become less useful over time. But entropy depends on the level of information needed to describe the system. An ordered system (for example, balls are evenly distributed over a lattice) is easy to describe, since objects have simple connections with each other. On the other hand, an unordered system (balls distributed randomly) will take more information to describe because it's not a simple pattern on them. Thus, when the second law says that entropy can never decrease, it is assumed that the physical information of the system cannot decrease. In other words, information cannot be destroyed.

The problem with the event horizon is that you could throw an object (with a lot of entropy) into a black hole and the entropy should just go away. In other words, the entropy of the universe will be less, which will violate the second law of thermodynamics. Of course, this does not take into account quantum effects, precisely those known as Hawking radiation, first proposed by Stephen Hawking in 1974.

The original idea of Hawking's radiation is related to the uncertainty principle in quantum theory. In quantum theory, there are limits to what can be known about an object. For example, you cannot know exactly the energy of an object. Because of this uncertainty, the energy of a system can fluctuate spontaneously, provided that its average remains constant. Hawking showed that near the event horizon of a black hole, pairs of particles can appear when one particle is trapped inside the event horizon (slightly reducing the mass of the black hole), while the other can escape as radiation (carrying away some of the energy of the black hole).

Since these quantum particles appear in pairs, they are "entangled" (connected in a quantum sense). It doesn't really matter if you don't want Hawking radiation to emit the information contained inside the black hole. In Hawking's original formulation, the particles appeared by chance, so the radiation coming from the black hole was purely random. Thus, Hawking radiation will not allow you to recover any captured information.

To allow Hawking radiation to carry information out of the black hole, the entangled connection between pairs of particles must be broken at the event horizon, so the particles can get lost with the information-bearing substances inside the black hole. This disruption of the original entanglement should make the escaping particles appear like an intense "wall of fire" on the surface of the event horizon. This would mean that anything heading towards the black hole would not end up in the black hole. Instead, it will be evaporated by Hawking radiation when it reaches the event horizon. It would seem that either the physical information of an object is lost when it falls into a black hole (the information paradox), or objects evaporate before entering it (the fire wall paradox).

In this new work, Hawking offers a different approach. He argues that instead of gravitational warping of space and time in the event horizon, quantum fluctuations in Hawking radiation create a layer of turbulence in the region. So instead of a sharp event horizon, a black hole will have an "apparent horizon" that looks like an event horizon but allows information to leak out.

If Stephen Hawking is right, then he can resolve the information/fire wall paradox that plagues theoretical physics. Black holes still exist in the astrophysical sense (the one at the center of our galaxy isn't going anywhere), but they will be devoid of an event horizon. It should be emphasized that Hawking's work is not peer-reviewed and is somewhat lacking in detail. This is more of a presentation of an idea than a detailed solution to a paradox. Further research will be needed to determine if this idea will be the solution that has been sought for so long.

But today, few scientists doubt their existence. Superdense objects with almost absolute mass and gravity are the end product of the evolution of giant stars, they bend space and time and do not even allow light.

However, Laura Mersini-Houghton, professor of physics at Northern California University, proved mathematically that black holes may not exist at all in nature. In connection with her findings, the researcher does not propose to revise modern ideas about space-time, but she believes that scientists are missing something in theories about the origin of the Universe.

"I'm still shocked. For half a century we have been studying the phenomenon of black holes, and these gigantic amounts of information, coupled with our new findings, give us food for serious thought," Mersini-Houghton admits in a press release.

The generally accepted theory is that black holes are formed when a massive star collapses under its own gravity to a single point in space. This is how the singularity, an infinitely dense point, is born. It is surrounded by the so-called event horizon, a conditional line that everything that has ever crossed has never returned back into outer space, the attraction of a black hole turned out to be so strong.

Theories about black holes and the origin of the universe are now in doubt

The reason for the unusualness of such objects is that the nature of black holes is described by contradictory physical theories - relativism and quantum mechanics. Einstein's theory of gravity predicts the formation of black holes, but the fundamental law of quantum theory says that no information from the universe can disappear forever, and black holes, according to Einstein, particles (and information about them) disappear for the rest of the universe beyond the event horizon forever.

Attempts to combine these theories and come to a unified description of black holes in the Universe ended with the emergence of a mathematical phenomenon - the paradox of information loss.

In 1974, the famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking used the laws of quantum mechanics to prove that particles can still go beyond the event horizon. This hypothetical stream of "lucky" photons is called Hawking radiation. Since then, astrophysicists have uncovered some pretty solid evidence for the existence of such radiation.

The disappearance of information in a black hole is paradoxical and impossible in terms of quantum mechanics

(illustrated by NASA/JPL-Caltech).

But now Mersini-Houghton describes a completely new scenario for the evolution of the universe. She agrees with Hawking that the star collapses under its own gravity, after which it emits streams of particles. However, in his new work, Mersini-Houghton shows that by emitting this radiation, the star also loses its mass and does so at such a rate that when compressed, it cannot acquire the density of a black hole.

In her article, the researcher claims that a singularity cannot form and, as a result, . Documents ( , ) disproving the existence of black holes can be found on the ArXiv.org preprint site.

Since it is believed that our Universe is itself, then the question of the fidelity of the Big Bang theory is also being questioned in connection with new findings. Mersini-Houghton argues that in her calculations, quantum physics and relativism go hand in hand, as scientists have always dreamed of, and therefore it is her scenario that may turn out to be reliable.