There are other branches of contemporary physics that read like hard science fiction novels. In few branches of science we can find such a lot of extravagant ideas per square meter. And yes, most of the time they are crazy theories, greguerías armed with equations that, when push comes to shove, crash with what we call experimental evidence.
But that’s part of its charm.
This week, for example, I have found myself with a preprint very curious holding that black holes could be superdense stars, but in which there is no event horizon. At least some of them. The model is interesting because, incidentally, it leads to the elaboration of a whole composition hypothesis of dark matter.
Dark stars?
This is the photograph of a real black hole taken by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) In essence, this work attempts to solve one of the essential problems of black holes: singularities. After all, singularity is nothing more than “a region of space-time housed in its interior in which we cannot define the value of physical magnitudes like curvature or other geometric concepts. “That is not only difficult to imagine, but complex to explain.
“How could matter collapse to that point?” Detractors of the existence of such targets wondered for years. Finally, Einstein and the consequences of his theories took the cat to the water; however, there are still physicists trying to create models of black holes that do not carry the idea of singularity. This is a good example.
Igor Nikitin’s “dark stars” They look like black holes from the outside, but inside they are not; they contain “an extremely (but not infinitely) dense core of matter compressed to the smallest possible scale“, that is, it has a nucleus the size of the”Planck length“The smallest measurement that makes sense within physics today. That eliminates the need for singularity, yes, although it is not very clear where it would take us.
was originally published in
Engadget
for
Javier Jimenez
.
