The following article reprint holds out the hope that in the very near future the toroidal nature of our cosmos will be demonstrated beyond doubt. This will prove yet another scientific aspect of the Simple Explanation cosmology. Read on!
Are Black Holes
Actually Dark Energy Stars?
Why one physicist believes our whole
understanding of black holes is wrong.
Nautilus Jesse Stone
George
Chapline believes that the Event Horizon Telescope will offer evidence that
black holes are really dark energy stars. Photo by NASA.
What does the supermassive black
hole at the center of the Milky Way look like? We might find out. The Event
Horizon Telescope—really a virtual telescope with an effective diameter of the
Earth—has been pointing at Sagittarius A* for the last several years. Most
researchers in the astrophysics community expect that its images, taken from
telescopes all over the Earth, will show the telltale signs of a black hole: a
bright swirl of light, produced by a disc of gases trapped in the black hole’s
orbit, surrounding a black shadow at the center—the event horizon. This
encloses the region of space where the black-hole singularity’s gravitational
pull is too strong for light to escape.
But George Chapline, a physicist at
the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, doesn’t expect to see a black hole.
He doesn’t believe they’re real. In 2005, he told Nature that
“it’s a near certainty that black holes don’t exist” and—building on previous
work he’d done with physics Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin—introduced an
alternative model that he dubbed “dark energy stars.” Dark energy is a term
physicists use to describe a peculiar kind of energy that appears to permeate
the entire universe. It expands the fabric of spacetime itself, even as gravity
attempts to bring objects closer together. Chapline believes that the immense
energies in a collapsing star cause its protons and neutrons to decay into a
gas of photons and other elementary particles, along with what he refers to as
“droplets of vacuum energy.” These form a “condensed” phase of spacetime—much
like a gas under enough pressure transitions to liquid—that has a much higher
density of dark energy than the spacetime surrounding the star. This provides
the pressure necessary to hold gravity at bay and prevent a singularity from
forming. Without a singularity in spacetime, there is no black hole.
The idea has found no support in the
astrophysical community—over the last decade, Chapline’s papers on this topic
have garnered only single-digit citations. His most popular paper in particle
physics, by contrast, has been cited over 600 times. But Chapline suspects his
days of wandering in the scientific wilderness may soon be over. He believes that
the Event Horizon Telescope will offer evidence that dark energy stars are
real.
This
strange toroidal geometry isn’t a bug of dark energy stars, but a feature.
The idea goes back to a 2000 paper, with Evan Hohlfeld and David Santiago, in
which Chapline and Laughlin modeled spacetime as a Bose-Einstein condensate—a
state of matter that arises when taking an extremely low-density gas to
extremely low temperatures, near absolute zero. Chapline and Laughlin’s model
is quantum mechanical in nature: General relativity emerges as a consequence of
the way that the spacetime condensate behaves on large scales. Spacetime in
this model also undergoes phase transformations when it gains or loses energy.
Other scientists find this to be a promising path, too. A 2009 paper by a group of Japanese physicists
stated that “[Bose-Einstein Condensates] are one of the most promising quantum
fluids for” analogizing curved spacetime.
Chapline and Laughlin argue that
they can describe the collapsed stars that most scientists take to be black
holes as regions where spacetime has undergone a phase transition. They find
that the laws of general relativity are valid everywhere in the vicinity of the
collapsed star, except at the event horizon, which marks the boundary between
two different phases of spacetime.
In the condensate model the event
horizon surrounding a collapsed star is no longer a point of no return but
instead a traversable, physical surface. This feature, along with the lack of a
singularity that is the signature feature of black holes, means that paradoxes
associated with black holes, like the destruction of information,
don’t arise. Laughlin has been reticent to conjecture too far beyond his and
Chapline’s initial ideas. He believes Chapline is onto something with dark
energy stars, “but where we part company is in the amount of speculating
we are willing to do about what ‘phase’ of the vacuum might be inside”
what most scientists call black holes, Laughlin said. He’s holding off until
experimental data reveals more about the interior phase. “I will then write my
second paper on the subject,” he said.
In recent years Chapline has
continued to refine his dark energy star model in collaboration with several
other authors, including Pawel Mazur of the University of South Carolina and
Piotr Marecki of Leipzig University. He’s concluded that dark energy stars
aren’t spherical or oblate, like black holes. Instead, they have the shape of a
torus, or donut. In a rotating compact object, like a dark energy star,
Chapline believes quantum effects in the spacetime condensate generate a large
vortex along the object’s axis of rotation. Because the region inside the
vortex is empty—think of the depression that forms at the center of
whirlpool—the center of the dark energy star is hollow, like an apple without
its core. A similar effect is observed when quantum mechanics is used to model
rotating drops of superfluid. There too, a central vortex can form at the
center of a rotating drop and, surprisingly, change its shape from a sphere to
a torus.
In
the condensate model the event horizon surrounding a collapsed star is no
longer a point of no return but instead a traversable, physical surface.
For Chapline, this strange toroidal
geometry isn’t a bug of dark energy stars, but a feature, as it helps explain
the origin and shape of astrophysical jets—the highly energetic beams of
ionized matter that are generated along the axis of rotation of a compact
object like a black hole. Chapline believes he’s identified a mechanism in dark
energy stars that explains observations of astrophysical jets better than
mainstream ones, which posit that energy is extracted from the accretion disk
outside of a black hole and focused into a narrow beam along the black hole’s
axis of rotation. To Chapline, matter and energy falling toward a dark energy star
would make its way to the inner throat (the “donut hole”), where electrons
orbiting the throat would, as in a Biermann Battery, generate magnetic fields
powerful enough to drive the jets.
Chapline points to experimental work where scientists, at the
OMEGA Laser Facility at the University of Rochester, created magnetized jets
using lasers to form a ring-like excitation on a flat surface. Though the
experiments were not conducted with dark energy stars in mind, Chapline
believes it provides support for his theory since the ring-like
excitation—Chapline calls it a “ring of fire”—is exactly what he would expect
to happen along the throat of a dark energy star. He believes the ring could be
the key to supporting the existence of dark energy stars. “This ought to
eventually show up clearly” in the Event Horizon Telescope images, Chapline
said, referring to the ring.
Black Hole vs. Dark Energy Star: When viewed from the top down, a dark energy star has a central opening, the donut hole. Chapline believes that matter and energy rotating around the central opening (forming the “ring of fire”) is the source of the astrophysical jets observed by astronomers in the vicinity of what most believe to be black holes.
Chapline also points out that dark
energy stars will not be completely opaque to light, as matter and light can
pass into, but also out of, a dark energy star. A dark energy star won’t have a
completely black interior—instead it will show a distorted image of any stars
behind it. Other physicists, though, are skeptical that these kinds of
deviations from conventional black hole models would show up in the Event
Horizon Telescope data. Raul Carballo-Rubio, a physicist at the International
School for Advanced Studies, in Trieste, Italy, has developed his own
alternative model to black holes known as semi-classical relativistic stars.
Speaking more generally about alternative black hole models Caraballo-Rubio said,
“The differences [with black holes] that would arise in these models are too
minute to be detected” by the Event Horizon Telescope.
Chapline plans to discuss his dark
energy star predictions in December 2018, at the Kavli Institute for
Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara. But even if his predictions are
confirmed, he said he doesn’t expect the scientific community to become
convinced overnight. “I expect that for the next few years the [Event Horizon
Telescope] people will be confused by what they see.”
Jesse Stone is a freelance writer
based in Iowa City, Iowa. Reach him at jessebstone@gmail.com.
