[snarks_when_bored]

Interesting to consider. Chapline and his collaborators have been talking about this for a couple of years (and have met with some skepticism, as one might expect):

"Dark Energy Stars" (December, 2004)

"Quantum Phase Transitions and the Breakdown of Classical General Relativity" (2003)

Luboš Motl has an amusing critical take on Chapline's work (in a blog posting from March 14, 2005):

Chapline: black holes don't exist

[snarks_when_bored]

Ping

[fieldmarshaldj]

"Because information about the matter is lost forever, this conflicts with the laws of quantum mechanics, which state that information can never disappear from the universe."

Oh, yeah. Explain THAT to the liberals that run Wikipedia.

[satchmodog9]

The Dark Side of the Universe.

[Moonman62]

The most intriguing fallout from this idea has to do with the strength of the vacuum energy inside the dark energy star. This energy is related to the star's size, and for a star as big as our universe the calculated vacuum energy inside its shell matches the value of dark energy seen in the universe today. "It's like we are living inside a giant dark energy star," Chapline says. There is, of course, no explanation yet for how a universe-sized star could come into being.

We're still stuck inside a black hole.

[Moonman62]

"The big bang would have created zillions of tiny dark energy stars out of the vacuum," says Chapline, who worked on this idea with Mazur. "Our universe is pervaded by dark energy, with tiny dark energy stars peppered across it." These small dark energy stars would behave just like dark matter particles: their gravity would tug on the matter around them, but they would otherwise be invisible.

Aren't tiny black holes supposed to evaporate?

[grey_whiskers]

Interesting to consider.

Even more interesting:

Look by analogy to the Michelle Malkin, Dowd(*), and Ann Coulter threads, can't we introduce some simple rules for any theoretical physics threads?

(*)Zeta-Jones discontinuity PING! ;-)

Cheers!

[4U2OUI]

Mark for later read.

PS- "Audacious"??? Must be a Sanofi-Aventis employee...

[timer]

Dr Mills hydrinos(shrunken hydrogen atoms)answers the problem of dark matter. The UV lines in the solar spectrum clearly show that hydrinos are produced naturally in stars and thus hydrino molecules, which take up to 5 million degrees F to separate, is cosmic "smog". Thus as long as stars have shown, like CO2-smog producing cars have been running, shrunken hydrogen atoms/molecules have been churned out in stellar fusion-factories as a natural process. See

[wafflehouse]

very interesting stuff!

[ccmay]

I'm sure when historians look back, they'll wonder why people didn't question these contradictions.

Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.
-- Francisco d'Anconia

That's how science advances. After the Michelson-Morley experiments, Einstein questioned long-accepted premises about the universal constancy of time and the Euclidean geometry of space, resulting in the theories of special and general relativity.

-ccm

[Ichneumon]

"We start with effects actually seen in the lab, which I think gives it more credibility than black holes," says Chapline. With this idea in mind, they - along with Emil Mottola at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Pawel Mazur of the University of South Carolina in Columbia and colleagues - analysed the collapse of massive stars in a way that did not allow any violation of quantum mechanics. Sure enough, in place of black holes their analysis predicts a phase transition that creates a thin quantum critical shell. The size of this shell is determined by the star's mass and, crucially, does not contain a space-time singularity. Instead, the shell contains a vacuum, just like the energy-containing vacuum of free space.

It sounds to me that they're not actually *replacing* the idea of black holes with something else that's not a black hole, what they're really saying is that the physics of black holes might be different than previously thought, especially "inside" the black hole.

[Ichneumon]

"People have been vaguely uncomfortable about these problems for a while, but they figured they'd get solved someday," says Chapline. "But that hasn't happened and I'm sure when historians look back, they'll wonder why people didn't question these contradictions."

His second statement isn't quite fair -- as shown by his first statement, people *have* questioned the contradictions, but there's not much you can do about them until you manage to come up with a good way to resolve them. And often it can take a long time for the right "aha!" insight to arrive.

[AndrewC]

"It's like we are living inside a giant dark energy star,"

And it is becomer "gianter"!!

[Kirkwood]

"Because information about the matter is lost forever, this conflicts with the laws of quantum mechanics, which state that information can never disappear from the universe."

Holey moley... Where in the heck did this guy study astrophysics? He needs to get a refund on his education. The matter isn't lost. It still exists in the universe. It is simply sucked down to the bottom of a gravity well (black hole) and in fact creates that very same gravity well. If there was no matter tucked away inside of a black hole, it wouldn't have such a strong gravity well.

[F.J. Mitchell]

Three cosmic enemas? We don't allow that kinky stuff on FR! Callimg all Moderators!

[bvw]

[T]heir analysis predicts a phase transition that creates a thin quantum critical shell. The size of this shell is determined by the star's mass and, crucially, does not contain a space-time singularity. Instead, the shell contains a vacuum, just like the energy-containing vacuum of free space. As the star's mass collapses through the shell, it is converted to energy that contributes to the energy of the vacuum.

The team's calculations show that the vacuum energy inside the shell has a powerful anti-gravity effect, just like the dark energy that appears to be causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. Chapline has dubbed the objects produced this way "dark energy stars".

Sweet. Now question is begged, where did all OUR vacuum energy come from? Bye bye multiverse. (Specualtion on my part.)

[Physicist]

Every week, New Scientist announces some breakthrough that overturns all of physics.

As for this stuff, I'm not expert enough to critique it, but my physics sense isn't getting the warm fuzzies. A black hole is a dead-simple geometric effect that pops out of General Relativity. It's really difficult to avoid having them, in fact. And while it's true that quantum mechanics isn't exactly comfortable with them, there's no way we'll know the correct reconciliation until we have a theory of quantum gravity in hand. Without that theory, I don't see how these gentlemen could have stumbled across the correct explanation.

And since they say that if we could study one close-up, the difference between a black hole and a "dark energy star" would be very subtle, I think I'm better off sticking with the simple, well-studied model instead of this abstruse one. (That's not to say they're wrong; just that their idea doesn't seem useful right now.)

[doc30]

This is very interesting stuff. I do like how someone is trying to incorporate quantum mechanics into the description of black holes. That is a very important, and fundamental, description. Perhaps this is an small, incremental step to reconcilling quantum mechanics with relativity. I suppose it won't be a clear reconcilliation until we can probe events at the Plack scale and maybe, detect and deduce any quantum nature of space. Personally, I am more comfortable with this explanation than envoking a singularity and not fully accounting for quantum properties of matter. Anyone know if the Large Hadreon Collider will be able to probe events in these energy scales? I thought I heard it could create mini black holes. If so, there is room for experiments in this area.

[phantomworker]

the objects that till now have been thought of as black holes could in fact be dead stars that form as a result of an obscure quantum phenomenon.

Hasn't this been a theory for a long time? I once saw a video of black holes forming at a UC Berkeley physics colloquium. Most fascinating phenomenon!

[Interesting Times]

Ping.