Tag Archives: White Holes

White Holes, Black Holes, and the Cosmic Cycle

20 March 2025 By in Physics, Science, Space Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

White holes, theoretical counterparts to black holes, might be two sides of a cosmic coin. Black holes devour matter with relentless gravity; white holes expel it, hurling energy, particles, and possibly time into the universe. Both stem from Einstein’s general relativity, which predicts black holes, proven by solid evidence, while white holes remain elusive, perhaps lurking beyond our Earthly senses. 

To see their link, rethink black holes’ strangest feature and flaw: the singularity. General relativity paints it as a point where spacetime crushes so tight that physics breaks, a bug, not a feature. Exotic matter, with odd traits like negative energy, was once the fix. But the University of Barcelona’s Pablo Bueno and team ditched it, tweaking gravity with higher-curvature corrections to erase singularities. This needs extra dimensions beyond our four, turning black holes from traps into dynamic zones. 

The University of Sheffield adds a twist: the event horizon isn’t sharp. Quantum gravity blurs it into a fuzzy gateway where spacetime bends, not breaks. In 4D, black holes are sinkholes, matter vanishes. In higher dimensions, it slips through, heading elsewhere. Sheffield’s take ties this to dark energy, the universe’s expansion driver. Here, it’s the power plant: quantum fluctuations, fueled by dark energy, replace the singularity with a bounce, flipping spacetime to a white hole. 

Enter white holes, Janus-like transitions, Roman god of gates and duality. Black holes vacuum everything; white holes, linked via higher dimensions, spit it out, maybe far off. Picture Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way’s core black hole, channeling matter 25,000 light-years to the Orion Nebula’s arm. Unseen, white holes might hide in dimensions we can’t touch. 

This hints at a cosmic cycle, like Earth’s water cycle: evaporate, rain, repeat. Black holes swallow, dark energy and quantum gravity bounce it through higher dimensions, and white holes release it back. Barcelona and Sheffield suggest no endpoints, just a recycling of cosmic raw materials across realms we’re barely capable of understanding.

Source: Black Hole Singularity, Gielen and Menendez-Pidal, University of Sheffield, 2025. Regular Black Holes…by Bueno, P. et al, Physics Letter B, February 2025. Graphic: Black Hole Rendering.

Gravity and Vanilla Black Holes

27 February 2025 By in Physics, Science, Space Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which includes gravity, predicts that black holes have a tricky feature: a singularity. This is a point where space and time are squeezed so tightly that the laws of physics break down—think of it as a cosmic “error message.” To fix this, scientists often turn to exotic matter—hypothetical substances with bizarre properties like negative energy—to smooth things out. However, a team from the University of Barcelona, led by Pablo Bueno, found an alternative. They didn’t need exotic matter at all. Instead, they tweaked Einstein’s gravity by adding an infinite series of extra “rules” (higher-curvature corrections) to the math.

Their solution works in spacetimes with more than four dimensions—beyond our usual height, width, depth, and time. In these higher-dimensional worlds, black holes can exist without singularities. This “smooths out” black holes, making them less mysterious and more like regular objects in spacetime—no weird stuff required.

The presence of extra dimensions doesn’t just fix singularities—it can also change how black holes behave. In higher-dimensional spacetimes, black holes might have different event horizon shapes (the boundary beyond which nothing escapes) or other structural quirks. The Barcelona team’s work shows that these altered properties emerge naturally from gravity in more than four dimensions, offering a fresh perspective on these cosmic giants.

Thinking outside the box, is it possible that these extra dimensions link black holes to “a reality outside regular spacetime,” like wormholes (tunnels through spacetime), braneworlds (parallel universes on higher-dimensional “membranes”), or even gateways to white holes (theoretical opposites of black holes that spit stuff out)? Theories like string theory and braneworld scenarios suggest that extra dimensions might allow such connections. For example, a wormhole could theoretically bridge two distant points in our universe—or even lead to a completely different universe.

While the math of higher dimensions opens the door to these possibilities, it’s all conjecture. The Barcelona team’s work is a major step forward in understanding black holes in higher dimensions, but it doesn’t directly prove connections to other realities.

Source: Grok 3. Regular Black Holes… by Bueno, P. et al., Physics Letter B, February 2025. Graphic: Black Hole Rendering, iStock licensed.