Few things are as scary as black holes; they devour everything, even enormous stars, dust,
and stray spaceships.
Their thirst is so great that they swallow light.
However, the opposite of black holes exists, and they are no less terrifying.
These gigantic objects are known as white holes, and their discovery sparked excitement
in the astronomy community.
What are white holes, how do they form, and how can they affect you as a person?
Join us as we dig into how scientists first uncover white holes and how it affects everything.
You don't want to come too close to a black hole because otherwise you'll wind up inside
its belly.
The most popular types of black holes Stellar black holes form when the core of a huge star
collapses in on itself.
This collapse also results in a supernova or an exploding star, which sends a chunk
of the star into space.
Scientists believe supermassive black holes formed simultaneously with the galaxy, which
means that most galaxies, including the Milky Way, have a black hole at their core.
The size of the supermassive black hole is proportional to the size and mass of the galaxy
in which it lies.
The black hole at the center of our galaxy is known as Sagittarius A* and can gulp down
up to 4 millions of our suns with room to spare.
We could have ended up in its belly, but we were safe because we were far enough away.
The intense gravity that blackholes impose on objects close to them is caused by a massive
amount of matter being compressed into a tiny space.
This compression can take place at the end of a star's life.
Yes, exploding stars are dying stars, and no, the sun will never become a black hole
because it is too small; instead, it will become a red giant star, after which it will
turn into a dazzling ring of gas known as a planetary nebula.
Finally, the sun will be reduced to the size of a cooling white dwarf star.
You can't see a black hole like you can see a star, but scientists can spot them by their
effect on their surroundings.
The first way we detect black holes is by their gravitational influence for example,
at the center of the Milky Way, we see an empty region where all the stars circle as
if they were orbiting a tremendously dense mass, and that's where the black hole is.
The second method is to see matter falling into the black hole.
As matter falls in, it settles in a disc around the black hole, which can get very hot.
A portion of the energy released by falling in is converted into light, which we can then
see, for example, in x-rays.
Now assume you have the ability to reverse a black hole.
Deep space is a scary place with a lot going on at the same time, so while black holes
grab at everything, their counterparts' white holes do the opposite.
As previously stated, a theoretical white hole is the polar opposite of a black hole.
Nothing can escape the intense gravitational pull of a black hole after material has reached
the event horizon.
Similarly, a white hole is a region in which space-time flows inexorably outwards.
White holes are thought to emit light radiating at levels equal to a black hole's force since
it is supposed to have an event horizon radius that forbids the entry of any matter, including
light.
Albert Einstein discovered in 1905 that although accelerating observers experience time differently,
that does not apply to non-accelerating observers when moving at a constant speed or stationery.
He also discovered the universal truth that the speed of light was independent of all
motion.
The theory of white holes was derived from the mathematical fascination of black holes.
Einstein subsequently presented his general theory of relativity, which states that objects
with mass have gravity, but that gravity is a distortion of time and space rather than
an actual physical force.
Karl Schwarzschild extended Einstein's field equations by using them to solve the equation
of mass in empty space-time or an area completely devoid of all matter, resulting in the Schwarzschild
metric.
The equation itself is very complex, but it is simply a mathematical representation of
a black hole.
The black hole in Schwarzschild's equation, on the other hand, is of the type that has
no charge or change and is known as an eternal black hole, which is a black hole that does
not change in size and has always existed.
As previously stated, all events beyond the event horizon occur infinitely far in the
future and thus never occur to an outside observer.
The Schwarzschild metric demonstrates that at the idealized black hole, space becomes
time and time becomes space, swapping their roles so that the singularity of the black
hole is in some inevitable future time rather than a place.
You can observe a dying star if you try to turn back time in a real black hole, but if
you do it with an eternal black hole, you get a white hole.
There are a number of hypotheses on the genesis of white holes, but researchers hypothesized
that black holes and white holes are related, with matter and energy falling into a black
hole perhaps coming from a white hole either somewhere in the universe or from another
universe entirely.
Carlo Rovelli and his colleagues in France proposed that black holes and white holes
may be linked in another way: when black holes die, they may become white holes.
Stephen Hawking, a theoretical physicist, calculated in the 1970s that all black holes
should evaporate mass by producing radiation.
Black holes that lose more mass than they gain are expected to contract and eventually
disappear.
However, Rovelli and his colleagues proposed that contracting black holes could not vanish
if the fabric of space and time were formed of indivisible quantities known as quanta.
Space-time is quantum in research that aims to combine general relativity, which can explain
the nature of gravity, with quantum mechanics, which can describe the behavior of all known
particles, into a single theory that can explain all of the universe's forces.
Rovelli and his colleagues proposed in 2014 that after a black hole evaporated to the
point where it could no longer shrink anymore because space-time could not be squeezed into
anything smaller, the dying black hole would rebound to become a white hole.
However, the process of a black hole converting into a white hole, as proposed by Rovelli
and his colleagues, is slow.
Rovelli estimated that a black hole with the mass of the sun would take about a quadrillion
time the current age of the universe to convert into a white hole.
Furthermore, this theory implies that white holes cannot be created directly, unlike black
holes that result from dying stars.
According to alternative ideas, white holes formed within a second after the big bang
as a result of random density fluctuations in the hot, fast expanding newborn universe.
According to this school of thought, locations where these fluctuations gathered matter together
might have collapsed to produce black holes; these primordial black holes would have been
far smaller than stellar mass black holes and could have died to generate white holes
within the universe's lifetime.
Rovelli and his colleagues noted that for the time being, white holes are only theoretical,
but that is no reason to dismiss the science behind their discovery; after all, black holes
began as an idea as well, and they have not only been proven to exist, but have been discovered
to exist all over our observable universe.
One of the greatest mysteries in the universe exists within the concept of the universe's
expansion we know for certain that the universe is expanding but we aren't sure what is causing
it but, similarly to other invisible things in existence and science, we believe it is
caused by dark energy.
The expansion of the universe is in a sense the effect on other natural phenomena we can
observe that lends credence to the existence of this mysterious and invisible force we
call dark energy.
Could white holes be connected to this growing mystery?
Could they be the tipping point for dark energy?
Could it be that while black holes of the force are attempting to bring this universe
together, white holes are actively working against those aims by pushing the universe
apart?
Could the answer to this cosmic mathematical riddle be something even more outrageous?
Because as is often the case the truth is stranger than fiction.
While some scientists argue that white holes do not exist, the concept has the potential
to solve a number of physics problems.
The first is the black hole information paradox, which states that information entering black
holes would disappear entirely along with the death of a black hole as it faded away
into nothing, but because information is supposed to be in violet and can never be completely
destroyed, quantum bounces would neatly solve that problem.
All of the information held within a black hole is simply blasted out when it becomes
a white hole.
Does this indicate that there is theoretically hope for anyone who falls within a black hole?
One thing is certain: we do not encourage that you attempt to verify this theory.
The identity of dark matter might also be explained via white holes.
Another challenging concept for theorists to rationally explain.
The universe can't be held together by nothing; thus, something must be doing it.
According to the accepted theory, the mysterious substance that is invisible and resistant
to light or any other known natural force other than gravity is known as dark matter.
Even though it appears to account for 84 percent of all matter in the universe, no one is exactly
sure what dark matter is, but a 2018 article suggested that white holes fit the descriptions
of this difficult to detect and made of a mysterious sort of substance.
It is tempting to believe that white holes might make up a significant portion, if not
the entirety, of the dark matter.
Even more astonishingly, white holes might actually be what we have always thought of
as the big bang.
If this seems absurd, hear us out: the mathematics relating to a white hole's emissions and the
big bang's creations are largely similar.
Additionally, both events are fundamentally mysterious; it is difficult to even consider
what happened before and what caused the big bang.
The same is true for white holes since they have inherently uncertain beginning; nonetheless,
Einstein's equations only explain how white holes can exist, not how they can originate.
What do you think about white holes?
Let us know in the comments section below.