Blog post #2
Caleb Lewis
space: the unexplored
Hairy Black holes
In 1963 Roy Kerr, developed the kerr vacuum. This included the proposition that black holes were ‘clean’. A black hole is an area of space and time that was once a star that collapsed once it’s density was too great. According to Kerrs theory, which happens to be the current theoretical paradigm for black holes gravitational status. black holes have a spherical gravitational pole that’s gravity is so great it has event horizon. Theoretically event horizon is a boundary where anything inside of it will never escape the pull of the mass. This implies that black holes are ‘clean’ as in perfect spherical masses. According to general relativity this theory is credible. the reason black holes are called black holes is considerably simplistic. From an outside point of view they are circles which suck up, literally anything that gets close to them. They are black, because they are so freaking dense that light can’t even escape them. light , which is the fastest thing that humans know about. Even though the first theories of black holes were long ago the first one we actually found is named Cygnus x-1 in 1974. cygnus x-1 has 6 times Earth’s suns’ gravity, we found it because it was giving off powerful x-ray pulses. Anyway, kerr claimed that black holes were clean or would appear to be smooth. So this means that they would have no distinctive qualities. In general black holes are practically identical, by the standards of the traditional model of course. This concludes that the only way to identify black holes is a black holes in general is a black hole’s mass and angular momentum. Finally i can get to the point of this post, and the point is that there is a new research underway, being conducted by a group of scientists, including Thomas Sotiriou, a physicist of the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) of Trieste. Sotiriou and the other researchers are working to prove kerr wrong, and that black holes are actually dirty. sotiriou wants to prove that they have hair. The ‘hair would act like anchors, or tethers to either the surrounding matter, or o the rest of the universe. Hair could actually be a whole new way to identify black holes. The researchers may be able to confirm the hairy black hole idea with interferometers which are instruments that monitor gravitational waves. According to Sotiriou’s calculations the growth of a black holes hair “is accompanied by the emission of distinctive gravitational waves. In the future, the recordings by the instrument may challenge Kerr’s model and broaden our knowledge of the origins of gravity.” -Sotiriou. Even though for the past 50 years the standard theories involving black holes concluded that black holes are bald this research might change a lot about how we look at black holes. The ‘hair’ may reveal what kind of matter fell into the black holes originally. The theories of gravity that the researchers are using are actually technically not brand new. They are called “scalar-tensor theories”, and originate with Einstein, which is kind of ironic, because if the new research is conclusive, then Einstein’s theory of relativity, which is the greatest theory of gravity, may not be the greatest after all. So a smaller theory of Einstein would lead to a triumph over the greatest theory of Einstein. Of course, science isn’t a competition. Actually, if you’d excuse that last sentence’s sarcasm, science is without a doubt a competition. A competition where a contestant can win a nobel prize, theoretically…
space: the unexplored 