J
jimglenn
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I posted this in freespace and it was suggested you starpeople might be interested. Enjoy!<br /><br />http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050328/full/050328-8.html<br /><br />Published online: 31 March 2005<br /><br />Black holes 'do not exist'<br /><br />Philip Ball <br /><br />These mysterious objects are dark-energy stars, physicist claims. <br /> <br />Black holes, such as the one pictured in this artist's impression, may in fact be pockets of 'dark energy'. <br /> <br />Black holes are staples of science fiction and many think astronomers have observed them indirectly. But according to a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, these awesome breaches in space-time do not and indeed cannot exist. <br /><br />Over the past few years, observations of the motions of galaxies have shown that some 70% the Universe seems to be composed of a strange 'dark energy' that is driving the Universe's accelerating expansion. <br /><br />George Chapline thinks that the collapse of the massive stars, which was long believed to generate black holes, actually leads to the formation of stars that contain dark energy. "It's a near certainty that black holes don't exist," he claims.<br /><br />Black holes are one of the most celebrated predictions of Einstein's general theory of relativity, which explains gravity as the warping of space-time caused by massive objects. The theory suggests that a sufficiently massive star, when it dies, will collapse under its own gravity to a single point.<br /><br />But Einstein didn't believe in black holes, Chapline argues. "Unfortunately", he adds, "he couldn't articulate why." At the root of the problem is the other revolutionary theory of twentieth-century physics, which Einstein also helped to formulate: quantum mechanics.<br /><br /> It's a near certainty that black holes don't exist. <br /><br />George Chapline<br />Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory <b></b> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>