What happens if a black hole explodes

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Groups Why Join? Astronomy Day. The Complete Star Atlas. Long after the last stars fade, black holes will herald the end of the universe with a spectacular show of fireworks. This strange appearance is caused by the intense gravity of a black hole, which distorts the fabric of space-time. Black holes are regions of space-time where gravity rules: The gravitational pull of a black hole is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. They range in size from stellar-mass black holes, whose masses can run from five to times that of the Sun, all the way to supermassive black holes, which can reach well over a billion solar masses.

Rovelli notes that he and Haggard must calculate more carefully how much time it takes for the black hole to transform into a white hole. Their current, rough estimate — a few thousandths of a second — is crucial to pin down, because the intense gravitational field of a black hole stretches light waves and dilates time, so that an outside observer would see the transformation occur over a much longer time.

If the time, as seen by an outside observer, were too short, then all the black holes that ever formed ought to have exploded and vanished, contradicting astrophysical observations. On the other hand, if the observed time were too long, the transformation to white hole would be inconsequential because black holes would already have fizzled out owing to Hawking radiation.

The team calculates that for a black hole the mass of the Sun, it would take about a thousand trillion times the current age of the Universe to convert into a white hole. In a recent paper 4 , Giddings proposes that information may escape black holes in a less explosive fashion, made possible by the grainy quantum structure of space-time.

Rovelli, C. Bojowald, M. Nature Phys. Agullo, I. Giddings, S. Download references. You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar.

Theoretical physics: Complexity on the horizon May Stephen Hawking: 'There are no black holes' Jan Simulations back up theory that Universe is a hologram Dec Did a hyper-black hole spawn the Universe?

Astrophysics: Fire in the hole! Follow the Bouncing Universe Oct Reprints and Permissions. Cowen, R. Quantum bounce could make black holes explode.

Nature Download citation. Published : 17 July The discreteness of space-time prevents matter from reaching anything smaller than the Planck length around 1. All the material that has ever fallen into the black hole gets compressed into a ball not much bigger than this. Perfectly microscopic, but definitely not infinitely tiny. This resistance to continued compression eventually forces the material to un-collapse i.

But because of the extreme time dilation effects around black holes, from our perspective in the outside universe it takes billions, even trillions, of years before they go boom. So we're all set for now. Another attempt to eradicate the singularity — one that doesn't rely on untested theories of quantum gravity — is known as the gravastar.

It's such a theoretical concept that my spell checker didn't even recognize the word. The difference between a black hole and a gravastar is that instead of a singularity, the gravastar is filled with dark energy.

Dark energy is a substance that permeates space-time, causing it to expand outward. It sounds like sci-fi, but it's real: dark energy is currently in operation in the larger cosmos, causing our entire universe to accelerate in its expansion.

As matter falls onto a gravastar, it isn't able to actually penetrate the event horizon due to all that dark energy on the inside and therefore just hangs out on the surface. But outside that surface, gravastars look and act like normal black holes.

However, recent observations of merging black holes with gravitational wave detectors have potentially ruled out the existence of gravastars, because merging gravastars will give a different signal than merging black holes, and outfits like LIGO the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory and Virgo are getting more and more examples by the day.

While gravastars aren't exactly a no-go in our universe, they are definitely on thin ice. The universe: Big Bang to now in 10 easy steps. Planck stars and gravastars may have awesome names, but the reality of their existence is in doubt. So maybe there's a more mundane explanation for singularities, one that's based on a more nuanced — and realistic — view of black holes in our universe. The idea of a single point of infinite density comes from our conception of stationary, non-rotating, uncharged, rather boring black holes.