Rethinking the Origins of the universe

Black holes have long attracted the imagination of the public and become the subject of popular culture, whether from Star Trek or Hollywood. Black holes are not understood at all-the darkest and densest objects in the universe do not even allow light to escape from them.

If you think black holes are not strange enough, then suppose they do: they don't exist at all.

By consolidating two seemingly contradictory theories, Laura Mersini-houghton, a professor of the Academy of Arts and Sciences from Unc-chapel Hill, mathematically proved that a black hole could not have been formed from the outset. This result not only forces scientists to rethink the composition of space and time, but also allows them to reflect on the origins of the universe.

"I still haven't come back from God," Mersini-houghton said. "We've spent more than 50 years studying the problem, but the result gives us a lot of questions to rethink," he said. ”

For decades, it has been thought that a black hole is formed by the discovery of a supermassive star in space under the action of its own gravity to create a single point-imagine flattening the earth and stuffing it into a small ball of peanuts-we call this point singularity. So the beginning of the story is that an invisible film called the event horizon revolves around the singularity, and crossing this boundary means you'll never be able to come back again. That's why a black hole's gravitational pull is strong enough to make it possible for anything to escape.

The reason why black holes are so strange is because it makes two fundamental theories of the universe contradictory. Einstein's theory of gravity points to the formation of black holes but one of the fundamental laws of quantum theory is that no information in the universe can be lost in thin air. People try to integrate the two theories, but only get the mathematical nonsense, making it a paradox of information loss.

In the 1974, what Stephen Hawking used quantum mechanics to reveal that black holes emit radiation. Since then, scientists have found more "fingerprints" of the same kind of radiation in the universe, creating an ever-increasing list of recorded cosmic black holes.

But now Mersini-houghton describes a completely novel situation. She agrees with Hawking that when a star collapses, Hawking radiation is produced. But, in her results, Mersini-houghton revealed that black holes emit radiation and lose their mass. So when it shrinks, there is not enough density to form a black hole.

Before it could form a black hole, the dying star was finally inflated and exploded. The singularity or event horizon is not formed. One of the most important messages in her paper is that there is nothing like a black hole in the universe.

This paper, recently presented to arxiv, a knowledge base for online physics papers without peer review, provides accurate numerical results for this problem and completes the collaboration with Harald Peiffer, the University of the Toronto of numerical relativity. Mersini-houghton's earlier paper, originally presented to ArXiv, was published on letters B of the journal Physics and provided an approximate result.

Experimental evidence may one day provide a physical basis for determining whether a black hole exists in the universe. But now, Mersini-houghton says the mathematical results are beyond doubt.

Many physicists and astronomers believe that our universe originated in a singular point and expanded from the Big Bang. If the singularity does not exist, however, physicists will have to rethink whether the big bang really happened.

"For decades physicists have been trying to combine these two theories--Einstein's theory of gravity and quantum mechanics, but this assumption has put two theories together." "Mersini-houghton said. "This is a great thing. ”

Mersini-houghton ' s ARXIV papers:


Approximate solutions:http://arxiv.org/abs/arxiv:1406.1525


Exact solutions:http://arxiv.org/abs/arxiv:1409.1837


by Thania Benios, Office of Communications and public affairs

Published September 23, 2014

Original address: http://unc.edu/spotlight/rethinking-the-origins-of-the-universe/