just caught wind of this even though the actual hypothesis is a few years old. ladies and gentlemen, (re)introducing, gravastars. “as if black holes weren’t mind-bending enough, a new hypothesis suggests an entirely new idea for nature’s densest objects. in fact, the idea goes black holes aren’t holes at all but black bubbles with very thick skins.”
the idea is interesting. another abstract theory based on higher mathematics which in dumbed down translation sounds reasonable enough. at least as reasonable, certainly, as the theory of black holes, with pin pricks of impossible density and unstoppable gravity, sucking in matter and light, bending space-time, depositing it all… where?! this article was great if for no other reason than to serve as a reminder that space is more truly unknown than any of us usually suppose. even though you’ve read about them, even though you “know” what a black hole looks like, having seen them hundreds of times in books, magazines, and of course disney’s movie, the plain fact is that they could VERY easily not exist. also i’m fairly certain this article provided the one and only occurrence of the sentence “black holes themselves remain mere theory, not fact” i’ve ever seen.
you might say, “seeing is believing! lets send a probe into one of those muthas! send a russian doll type probe with 5 or 6 portions which each record and broadcast the path of the portion before it! we’ll settle this once and for all! we’ll see whether it’s a hole or not, whether space-time actually warps…” but i’d have to say, “hold your horses.” the fact is the closest black hole (or gravastar, or giant undulating space blob, or whatever the hell it is our math predicts and our observations hint at) is about 1,600 light years away. we could send a probe, sure, only the signal it sent would be too weak to ever make it home, not to mention we’d never know if it were on target, still functioning, etc. and hell, by the time it was even an issue we could either be extinct, living under the iron fisted rule of a vicious venutian energy cloud, or… extinct (did i say that already?). so for all those reasons and a thousand others, our collective conception of what exactly these unseeable things are will have to be left to the theoreticians, and via the process of “trickle down reality” movies, magazines, and the discovery channel.