DailyDirt: Mysterious Black Holes

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The nature of black holes has been debated for years, as astronomers and physicists are puzzled by how these objects absorb matter/energy without violating agree-upon rules of the universe. Maybe black holes don't exist the way we thought they did? Or perhaps the laws of physics aren't quite right yet? (Or both!) Here are just a few links on these mysterious entities that are thankfully very far away.

• Black holes may not be entirely black, as some particles can escape the extreme gravitational pull as Hawking radiation. Black holes might "evaporate" away over time (in about 10^67 years) or they might leave behind some super dark remnants. The ongoing debate about the ultimate fate of a black hole hasn't been resolved just yet. [url]
• Japanese astronomers have recently reported the discovery of three intermediate black hole (IMBH) candidates. Astronomers have previously seen "small" black holes (~10x the mass of the sun) and supermassive black holes (millions/billions of times the mass of our sun), but black holes that are in-between in size are still a bit of a puzzle. [url]
• Stephen Hawking has published a paper saying that black holes have no "event horizon" (the theoretical boundary beyond which nothing can escape the black hole) and proposes an "apparent horizon" which pulls everything in but also leaks some stuff out. Hawking hasn't formalized this assertion, and he says whoever does will have to explain a grand unified theory of everything at the same time. [url]

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Filed Under: apparent horizon, astronomy, astrophysics, black holes, event horizon, gut, hawking radiation, imbh, intermediate black hole, stephen hawking