3/16/2023 0 Comments Where does a black hole lead to![]() Time does not pass at the same speed everywhere. A hole that explodes.īut then why do we see matter fall into black holes but do not see it immediately bouncing back out again? The answer – and this is the crucial point about what we are dealing with – lies in the relativity of time. Like the ball, it rebounds along the trajectory of the fall, in temporal reverse, and in this way the black hole transforms itself (by “tunnel effect”, as we say in the jargon) into its opposite: a white hole.Ī white hole? What is a white hole? It is another solution to the equations of Einstein (like black holes are) about which my university textbook says that “there is nothing like it in the real world”… It is a region of space into which nothing can enter, but from which things emerge. It rebounds like a ball dropped on the floor. Then something happens that always happens to matter in such cases: it rebounds. Matter stops falling and forms a kind of extremely small and extremely dense star: a “Planck star”. This is similar to the “pressure” that prevents electrons from falling into atoms: it is a quantum phenomenon. When it is most extremely concentrated,a tremendous pressure develops that prevents its ultimate collapse. In the research group I work with in Marseille, together with colleagues at Grenoble and at Nijmegen in the Netherlands, we are exploring a possibility that seems to us both simpler and more plausible: matter slows down and stops before it reaches the centre. “What happens to the matter that falls into the centre of the hole? We don’t know” Perhaps, for instance, the matter emerges in another universe? Perhaps even our own universe began this way, emerging though a black hole opened in a preceding one? Perhaps at the centre of a black hole everything melts into a cloud of probability where spacetime and matter no longer mean anything? Or perhaps black holes irradiate heat because the matter that enters them is mysteriously transformed, over zillions of years, into heat. ![]() The roads taken to explore answers to this question have so far been hazardous. The variables become infinite and nothing makes sense. And then… then the equations of Einstein lose all meaning. The matter falls ever faster until it reaches the central point. Einstein’s theory provides a precise and elegant mathematical description even of the inside of black holes: it indicates the path that material falling into a black hole must follow. On the other hand, there is still a small question of the kind that children specialize in when adults are overly enthusiastic: “But where does all the material that we see falling into a black hole go?”Īnd this is where things become difficult. The universe is surprising, variegated, full of things that we had never foreseen or imagined the existence of, but comprehensible. ![]() ![]() On the one hand we have a beautiful theory, general relativity, confirmed in spectacular manner by astronomical observations, which accounts perfectly well for what the astronomers see: these monsters that swallow stars revolve in vortices and produce immensely powerful rays and other devilry. And still, they remain utterly mysterious. They behave exactly as Einstein’s theory predicted a century ago, when no one dreamed that such peculiar objects could actually exist. Astronomers observe them, count them and measure them. They have now become “normal” objects for astronomers. THERE is something paradoxical in what we know about black holes. ![]() The universe is full of things we had never foreseen or imagined, none more so than black holes ![]()
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