A new study claims that black holes are, in fact, a kind of ‘fluff balls’.
For years, one of the theories surrounding black holes in the universe is that they were tunnels that distorted space-time. Now, a new study does not confirm, but does rule out, one of the main hypotheses regarding them.
For decades, scientists have debated what happens to the matter that entered black holes . It is known that she cannot escape from them, but so far there is no conclusive answer about her path to enter.
Black holes as “fluff balls”
The information paradox, as that question is called, was one of the areas that the late Stephen Hawking focused on. His work and that of others led him to understand that black holes evaporate and that information is somehow preserved. Understanding exactly how that happens could provide crucial insight in the quest to unify quantum mechanics with a theory of gravity.
When it comes to the information paradox, there have been multiple proposals on how to solve that in string theory, including the idea that black holes are wormholes , a very popular hypothetical construct in science fiction. Wormholes are a proposed connection to two different points in space-time, where matter passes through, but there is no evidence that they exist.
That is why a group of scientists has published a study in the Turkish Journal of Physics in which they conclude that the “wormhole” theory is not a reality.
“What we found from string theory is that all the mass of a black hole is not absorbed by the center,” explained Professor Samir Mathur of Ohio State University in a statement. “The black hole tries to squeeze things to a point, but then the particles stretch on these strings, and the strings begin to stretch and expand and it becomes a ball of fluff that expands to fill the entirety of the black hole.”
“In each of the versions that have been proposed for the wormhole approach, we found that the physics was not consistent,” said Mathur. “The wormhole paradigm tries to argue that, somehow, you could still think that the black hole is effectively empty with all the mass in the center. And the theorems we proved show that such a picture of the hole is not a possibility.” .
The study is not conclusive, but it does allow for scientific discussion.