I thought that some may be interested in the following piece.
A way to describe our universe could soon be that we are inside a dark energy star.
Dark energy & dark matter, two of the greatest mysteries confronting physiscists may turn out to be two sides of the same coin originating from a universe sized star and the big bang being the collapse of the star releasing zillions of tiny dark energy stars peppered accross it, thier gravity would tug on the matter around them.
This audacious idea will see the death of black holes and super massive black holes (believed to be the gravitational force at the centre of every galaxy).
Last week at the 22nd Pacific Coast Gravity Meeting, a seniour physicist George Chaplin suggested that what was thought to be black holes could in fact be dead stars that form as a result of an obscure quantum phenomenon & that these stars presence could explain both dark energy and dark matter.
This radical suggestion would get around some fundamental problems posed by the existence of black holes. One such problem arises from the idea that once matter crosses a black holes "
Event Horizon" (The point beyond which not even light can escape) it will be destroyed by the space time
"Singularity" at the centre of a black hole and the information contained in the matter is lost forever which conflicts with the laws of quantum mechanics which states that information can never dissapear from the universe.
Another problem is that light from an object falling into a black hole is stretched so dramatically by the immense gravity that observers outside will see time freeze so that the object will appear to sit at the
event horizon for ever,this freezing time also violates quantum mechanics.
People have been uneasy about these problems with black holes, but figured they would get solved. But that has not happened.
While looking for ways around these physical paradoxes, answers have been found in an unrelated phenomenam of bizarre superconducting crystals that go through something called
"Quantum physical phase transition" During this transition the spin of the electrons in the crystals are predicted to fluctuate wildly,
instead the fluctuations appear to slow down and even become still as if time itself has slowed down this is when they realised that if a
"Quantum physical phase transition" happened on the surface of a star it would slow down time and the surface would behave just like the Event Horizon. Quantum mechanics would not be violated because in this scenario time would not freeze entirely.
These effects are actually seen in the lab which gives it more credibility
With this idea in mind the team analysed the collapse of massive stars in a way that did not violate the two stated laws as noted above and sure enough, in place of a black hole their analysis predicts a phase transition that creates a thin quantum critical mass that crucially does not contain a space time singularity. Instead the shell contains a vacuum of free space. As the stars mass collapses through the shell it is converted to energy that contributes to the energy of the vacuum.
The vacuum energy inside the shell has a powerful anti-gravity effect, just like the dark energy that appears to be causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. Further, these stable stars can exist in a number of models of vacuum energy and would have shells that lie near the region where a black holes event horizon would form.
Dark energy stars and black holes would have identical external geometries. That does not mean they are indistinguishable while black holes violate the second paradox (all information in the matter is destroyed for ever), quantum physical shells are a two way street, matter crossing the shell decays and the anti gravity would spit the remnants back out again. This could also explain the excess positrons that are seen at the centre of the galaxy.
The team also calculated the energy spectrum of the released gamma rays;It is very similar to the spectrum observed in gamma-ray bursts. The matter falling into a dark energy star will heat up the star, causing it to emit infrared radiation and as telescopes improve over the next 10 years we will be able to search for this light.
Black hole expert Marek of the University of Sweden agrees that the idea of dark energy stars is worth pursuing "We really don't have any proof that black holes exist" he says "this is a very interesting alternative".
The most intriguing part of the idea has to do with the strength of the vacuum energy inside a dark energy star. This energy is related to the stars size and for a star as big as our universe the calculated vacuum energy matches the value of dark energy seen in the universe today,
It's like we are living inside a giant energy dark energy star.
The latest scientific review of this proposal says we know too little about dark energy and dark matter to judge but it will not be dismissed;
At the very least we can say the idea is not impossible