Black Holes May Collapse Into Their Exact Opposites: White Holes
Black Holes May Collapse Into Their Exact Opposites: White Holes
Despite its name, a black hole is not an empty void. Most black holes form when stars die in a supernova explosion, collapsing under their own gravity. When a star 10 times more massive than the sun dies in a supernova, for example, its mass can be squeezed into a ball with the diameter of New York City. The resulting gravitational field is so strong not even light can escape.
For decades, astrophysicists have wondered whether black holes destroy information -- meaning what falls into them is lost forever. A new model suggests that at the end of their lives, black holes turn into “white holes,” explosively pouring all the material they have ever swallowed into space, Nature reports.
According to the new model, developed by Carlo Rovelli and Hal Haggard from Aix-Marseille University in France, the transformation from a black hole to a white hole would occur right after the initial formation of the black hole. Their model is based on a theory called “loop quantum gravity” -- where gravity and space-time are quantized, woven from tiny-individual loops that can’t be subdivided any further.
As a dying star collapses under its own gravity, it’s surrounded by a boundary called the event horizon: the point of no return, past which nothing can escape the black hole’s gravity. The star will continue to shrink, but eventually it will reach a stage where it can’t get any smaller because the loops cannot compress anymore.
More:
https://www.iflscience.com/space/black-holes-may-collapse-their-exact-opposites-white-holes/