Jakarta –
So far, we may often hear about black holes in the universe that can contain any matter around them, including light. However, do you know about white holes, reflections of black holes that are rarely known by many people?
Although what is often researched and discussed is black holes, in fact white holes also have ‘oddities’ that are interesting to study for scientists. Unfortunately, until now the existence of white holes is still questionable and not known with certainty.
Related to Black Holes
Before understanding the nature of white holes, we must first know about black holes first. A black hole is a region of complete gravitational collapse, as quoted from the page Space.
Gravity in the black hole has overcome all other forces in the universe and is able to choke lumps of matter down to an infinitesimal point known as a singularity.
The event horizon will surround the singularity, not a dense physical boundary, but rather a boundary around the singularity where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape, including light.
Black holes form when massive stars die, where their massive weight pushes against their core, triggering black hole formation. Any matter near the black hole will be trapped by its strong gravity and pulled below the event horizon to its demise.
We can understand the formation of black holes and their interactions through Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
While to understand the concept of a white hole, we have to realize that general relativity doesn’t care about the flow of time. The equations are symmetrical with respect to time, meaning the math works whether traveling forwards or backwards in time.
What Is a White Hole Exactly?
When a black hole is formed, there will be an object that emits radiation and particles. Finally, it will explode and leave behind a huge star. That is what is then referred to as a white hole.
According to general relativity, this scenario is completely plausible. White holes have a singularity at their center and an event horizon at their boundaries. Not only that, a white hole will still be an object that has great gravity.
However, any matter that entered the white hole would immediately be ejected at a speed greater than that of light, causing the white light to shine intensely.
Anything outside the white hole can never enter inside, having to travel faster than the speed of light to cross the event horizon to the interior.
Contradictory Theories Regarding White Holes
Although white holes are in line with the mathematics of general relativity, their existence remains in question. This is because general relativity is not the only explanation for the cosmos.
There are other branches of physics that also give us insight into how the universe works, such as the theories of electromagnetism and thermodynamics.
The theory of thermodynamics has the concept of entropy, a measure of disorder in a system. The second law of thermodynamics reveals that closed entropy can only increase, meaning disorder always increases.
For example, when we throw a piano into a wood chopper, what comes out is a large amount of crushed debris. The disorder in the system has increased, and the second law of thermodynamics has been fulfilled.
However, if we threw a bunch of random pieces into the same wood chopper, we would not get a fully formed piano, because that would cause less disorder.
Highly ordered systems, such as life, could have arisen on Earth, but that only happened with increasing entropy within the sun. We still wouldn’t get a piano out of a wood chopper, no matter how we designed the system.
We can’t just run the black hole formation process upside down and get a white hole, because that would cause entropy to decrease, stars don’t magically appear from giant cosmic explosions.
Therefore, although general relativity does not take a stance on the existence of white holes, thermodynamics has provided the concept for opposing the existence of white holes.
The only way for a white hole to form is to have exotic processes operating in the early universe that have embedded the existence of white holes into the fabric of space-time itself.
In this way, the white hole formation process would avoid the problem of reducing entropy, white holes would exist, exist, since the beginning of time.
Unfortunately, a white hole would also be very unstable. They would still be gravitational and pulling matter toward them, but nothing would be able to cross the event horizon.
When anything, even a single photon (particle of light), approaches the white hole, it is doomed. If the particle approaches the event horizon, it will be unable to cross it, sending the system’s energy skyrocketing.
Eventually, the particle will have so much energy that it will trigger the collapse of the white hole into a black hole, ending its existence.
So, as exciting and confusing as white holes are, they don’t seem to be a feature of the real universe, just ghosts haunting the mathematics of general relativity.
Watch Video “The Biggest Black Hole Found, Bigger than the Sun”
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2023-08-14 14:00:00
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