A Black Hole's Core Could be a Strange "Planck Star"
upstart writes:
A Black Hole's Core Could be a Strange "Planck Star":
There's a lot of interesting theories about black holes, and what happens inside of them. The notion that once matter enters the event horizon around the singularity, nothing, not even photons themselves, can escape is one idea.
Traditionally, we have thought that within black holes, all matter the black hole consumes is compressed into a tiny, infinitely dense point - a singularity. Because the curvature of spacetime within this infinitely dense point also becomes infinite, we cannot know what happens inside of a singularity. Some ways to explain what happens even seem to contradict some universal laws.
In fact, when we try to model a singularity, the math tends to break down, which can lead to some wild results. However, although it may seem like black holes should not be able to exist (I mean, it's sort of illogical that matter can collapse down to an infinitely tiny point), they are mathematically compatible with certain theoretical models of the universe.
Many physicists through the years have come up with different theories that argue with the idea that the math is consistent, or that a singularity could exist at all. One such theory replaces a singularity with something beyond strange - known as a Planck star (or sometimes called a dark star).
[...] Overall, Planck stars are interesting but complicated ideas about the ways in which black holes may work. I'll leave it up to astronomers to decide whether they are viable replacements to the singularity theorem or not.
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