Real Life Astronomy

[Lt Cmdr Matt]

Do you believe in the theory of white holes? Right now scientists can only theorize that there are white holes to balance out the fact there is a black hole. What do you guys think?

[Chang]

what exactly would a white hle do? would it create negitive gravity? that doesn't make sense....well. a black hole has lots of gravity so it pulls stuff in, supossidly, so a white hole would have little gravity if any at all. I should not be thiking like this, bad for my health, and it is only 6 in the morning. I still have 2 and a half hours till school starts.............

[Ramage]

I have heard vaguely about the li'l puppies, but as my knowledge of even pop-astronomy from the 70s is about my hight point...

**sigh**

I cannot truly comment...

[Phantom]

Not sure. Can you post a site with more info?

[Lt Cmdr Matt]

ACtually I have not found a site. This was from my physics class and my personal thoughts about it. A white hole has not been proven! It is purly theoretical

[Phantom]

Originally posted by Lt Cmdr Matt
ACtually I have not found a site. This was from my physics class and my personal thoughts about it. A white hole has not been proven! It is purly theoretical

Ok then. Can you describe, in laymen's terms, what a 'white hole' is exactly?

[SIR SIG]

The Schwarschild metric is symmetrical though. That is, it allows for black holes that devour anything entering them and a "white hole" that emits the same tremendous amount of energy as a mirror image of the black hole. When a black hole is created it automatically creates a whitehole and a link to it. This link can be envisaged as a "wormhole" through to another Universe, or dimension.

There is a problem with this though. No one has ever "seen" a whitehole.

If they should exist then they disobey the second law of thermodynamics, the one that says entropy always increases, as they decrease entropy by spontaneously creating large amounts of energy. It is generally accepted that the second law of thermodynamics can not be broken by anything, irregardless of how much energy you have. So it looks like white holes can not exist and do not exist.

It was thought, by some, for a while that Quasars where possibly whiteholes. Quasars are tremendously far away and emit extremely large amounts of radiation. It is know generally thought that Quasars are extremely massive black holes, millions of solar masses, at the center of Galaxies early in the universe. The radiation is caused by the gas and dust being heated and excited as it falls into the black hole.

Also for wormholes to exist there must exist dimensions beyond the four that we know of today, length, breadth, height and time. Though a lot of theoretical work point to more dimensions existing there is no real physical evidence to accept these other dimensions as being real. After all, Physics is about modelling and understanding the real world we live in, not speculating about possible Universes just because the maths allow something to occur.

[Phantom]

Ah, Ok. Then I guess I could be willing to believe in them. Never been one to just rely on sight for something to be real. I've never personally seen a Great White Shark, and don't intend on it anytime soon, but I do know they exist.

The one thing I have learned from a study of Science, limited as it is, is that nothing is impossible...Improbable, yes. Impossible, no.

[Lt Cmdr Matt]

I already know what my teacher thinks, and most of my classmates. It was good to hear some other points of view. Personally I think that there probably are white holes.

[Calcoran]

AFAIR, black holes have never been easy to observe, and I'm probably wrong, but wasn't their existence theorized before they could actually be seen? And even if they weren't, there is a lot of things in Astronomy that was theorized before men were able to actually observe them (the last planet of our solar system for instance). Mind you, there probably are even more things that were thought theoretically probable, but were proved wrong later on, and were soon forgotten.

Still, white holes would be nice ...
<I>.... must ... not ... make ... joke!</I>

[Evan van Eyk]

I assume its difficult to tell. There are theories about anti-gravity, which go along with anti-matter. However I cannot see how a physical effect can be created which creates something which would be the opposite of a black whole. How should that work?
Everything is pushed away? On the other side there are theories that black wholes are actually worm wholes, which bend the space continuum in a 'short-cut' way. If that is true, they would need and 'exit' somewhere and maybe that's a white whole.
Ususally we see that nature is in balance. Energy, e.g. or most physical systems, like our solar system, work if they are in balance. Balance goes along with order and order is the precondition for larger system, thus I can see the need for white wholes and it would make sense speaking of a balance-idea.


SIR SIG, you are right it would contradict entropy - and entropy contradicts far more things ( we have that topic in our physics lessons right now at university ). The entropy contradicts the Big Bang idea in the sense that the universe will sometime fall together again. Entropy would not allow that, yet that theory goes along everything we know about gravity.
You may not forget, that entropy is no actual measurable effect, but something defined by physicals - thus we may not know everything about it.

[SIR SIG]

BTW I didn't write that.

I pulled it off a Astronomy Discussion board somewhere.

But unless we except that there are other 'spatial' dimensions/realities then I don't see how a White hole could function in our Universe unless the Laws of Phyics take a beating sometime in the future.

[Aldaron]

Of course, if the white-hole was the "out" end of a wormhole connecting it and a black-hole, entropy wouldn't be bothered by it at all, since all it would be doing was transferring matter/energy from one place in the universe to another.

Then again, I'm really not the person to be commenting on this - I got a migraine reading "A Brief History of Time", by S. Hawking; and he wrote it for laymen!

[Edited for addit below]

I also loved a quote I once heard (attributed to either Hawking or his pal, Kip Thorne, IIRC):

"Anyone who claims they understand quantum physics obviously doesn't."