New experiment completely changes what we know about black holes
Popular mechanics
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New research shows that fast rotating black holes have different qualities from slower holes.
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The idea has implications for other objects, like rapidly rotating stars.
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The goal of studying black holes is generally to marry classical physics and quantum physics.
Wait, these are black hole fuzz balls, or are they hairless? The great quest to understand black holes continues in the form of new research into the fastest examples.
Scientists have found that while most black holes follow a particular theorem about what falls inside, a black hole that spins fast enough can expand “hairs” all the way into regular space.
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Recently, scientists published new observations on the aging of black holes, a special case in which black holes seem to relax and start to return information about the event horizon. Now a second special case could do a bit of the same thing, but on the other side: Black holes that spin pretty quickly end up creating a sort of vortex of hairs that also connect it to the event horizon.
Think of a black hole like, well, a black box. This idea of ​​engineering and programming posits that a closed system could have almost everything inside, and our only way to look at it is to study the input and output. In the case of a black hole, what we put is literally anything, and what we get out of it is just a simple measure of mass.
The universe todayBrian Koberlein Explain:
“You could make a black hole with the hydrogen, the chairs, or those old copies of a sun. National Geographic from grandma’s attic, and there would be no difference. Mass is mass as far as general relativity is concerned.
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It’s the “hairless theorem†– that what you throw into the black hole is utterly despised and impossible to remember. It’s like those stringless tea bags, and your cup is the black hole. Or, more usefully, it’s like a wet dog resting. New research from Italian, French and British scientists study wet dog in motion:
“[R]rapid rotation can induce instability. This instability, which is the hallmark of spontaneous scalarization, should endow the black hole with scalar hair. Therefore, our results demonstrate a large class of theories which share the same stationary black hole solutions with general relativity at low spins, but which exhibit black hole hairs at sufficiently high spins.
Basically, low spinning speed black holes have a set of qualities, but when you change gears and spin faster, they acquire new qualities that go against what is commonly thought of holes. black.
And it does not stop there: “There is no obvious reason to believe that this instability is limited to [black holes], ” researchers write, “And that could also affect the rapidly rotating stars.” Therefore, our results demonstrate that there is a large class of theories where rotation could control for deviations from [general relativity]. “
Like almost all research on black holes and other lesser-known cosmic objects, the goal is to continue to eliminate a fundamental mismatch at the heart of physics. How can things which violate general relativity be understood in the same physical framework as things which do observe relativity? We still don’t know, but every step is important.
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