BLACK AND WHITE HOLES

December-2022
Viçosa – MG
 Júlia Cunha Pinheiro

BLACK AND WHITE HOLES

Paper presented as a partial requirement for

Obtainin the final certificate of level Focus –
Advanced at Fisk – Centro de Ensino.

Presented on 12/09/2022

REVIEW BOARD
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Teacher – Rafaela Sena

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Shirlei Cupertino – Coordinator

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Marinêz Vigo – Director

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Examiner teacher – (name)

Viçosa 2022
 1. INTRODUCTION

It is remarkable that from hundreds of years ago to the present day, the sky is one
of the things that most fascinates and confuses humans. Humanity has been increasingly
advanced with space observation technology, it is already possible to see places that have
never been imagined. Nowadays, one of the most striking discoveries was that of black
holes, super massive objects that inhabit the centers of galaxies.
 2. DEVELOPMENT

2.1. ORIGIN

Man has been searching more and more intensely for his origins. It is public knowledge
that all matter was formed due to an explosion of a microscopic particle - the big bang.
The first science thought of by man was astronomy, due to the fact that they felt the need
for information on time and direction.
In 1784, John Michell made a shocking prediction at the time, based on mathematical
accounts and a lot of theory, he assumed that if a star had 500 times the mass of the Sun,
it would have gravity so powerful that light would not be able to escape. Michell chose
to call such a "star" the Black Star. and that was the first theory of a black hole in history.
It is worth remembering that at that time, Albert Einstein had not even been born, and
Maxwell had not yet published his theory - which describes how light waves propagate.

2.2 THEORY

Michell was right about the existence of a body in which not even light escapes,
however, he was wrong about the reason. In 1905 (121 years later), Einstein published a
paper that would open the door to a revolutionary idea in physics, Special Relativity. Such
a theory was built on two postulates (laws), namely: "the laws of physics are the same,
no matter what frame of reference you are in" and "the speed of light is the same for every
observer." The second law might seem the weirder of the two, as it means that if you're
moving at 90% of the speed of light, and you shine a flashlight, you'll see the flashlight's
light travel at the speed of light. The same would happen if you were stopped and lit it.
These two postulates may seem simple, but they have a big consequence for light
to have a constant speed in all frames of reference, space and time cannot be constant. A
consequence of this is that the faster you travel, the slower time passes for you than for a
stationary person, the distances also get smaller. This means that space and time are not
two separate things, but one and the same. However, special relativity had some flaws,
mainly involving gravity and acceleration.
In 1915, Einstein published a new theory, the theory of general relativity. In which,
in a simplified way, he takes the special theory of relativity and applies it to the entire
universe. In general relativity, the universe was not only one with space-time, but space
also bowed before the mass of a body, which we call gravity. One of the equations we
use for this theory is the Einstein Field Equation - the equation is so complex that not
even Einstein himself believed that it would one day be solved. One day, a physicist
named Karl Schwarzschild, was able to find a solution to the Einstein equation. However,
this equation had a peculiar result. If you had enough mass, within a certain volume, the
escape velocity of light would equal the speed of light. but, the solution had a strange
point that neither Einstein nor Schwarzschild liked, when all the mass was inside a certain
volume - which became known as the Schwarzschild Radius - in addition to the escape
velocity being equal to the speed of light, the entire mass of the body appears to be
concentrated in a single point at the center of this sphere. This became known as the
Singularity, a point of infinite density at the center of a black hole.

2.3. WHAT BLACK HOLES ARE

Black Holes have no surface, what you are able to see is known as the Event Horizon
-a kind of barrier-. both mass and light can only pass into the
 horizon, precisely because it is at the event horizon that the escape velocity is equal to
that of light.
Black holes are caused by the gravitational collapse of very massive bodies, such as
stars. The origin of supermassive black holes is still unknown, as the only known method
would be for them to be extremely old (more than 14 billion years, which would be more
than the current age of the universe) and to have collided with another black hole over the
course of a year. It’s existence, which would result in the annihilation of the galaxy, since
the merger of two black holes would generate an energy equivalent to 100 million
supernovas.
When the solution to Einstein's field equation came along, people were amazed at the
idea of a singularity and an object of infinite density. However, to this day it is not known
for sure if the density of a black hole is really infinite or if we humans have miscalculated.
The next possible big breakthrough in physics will be the merging of relativity with
quantum mechanics. A large part of the scientific community expects this new equation
to have no singularities.
Recently, astronomers from the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) international
consortium revealed the first ever photo of the black hole at the center of the milky way,
Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A*. The scientific world is a constant search for answers to
questions, which are often too complicated to solve, so they create.

2.4. WHAT WHITE HOLES ARE

An example of a theory made, with the aim of solving the mystery of where the matter
swallowed by black holes goes, are white holes. white holes would be like black holes,
both could have mass, both could have spin and could even have charge. white holes are,
in theory, a body that instead of absorbing light like the black hole -in which nothing can
come out after passing through the horizon and events-, serves as an ejector of matter -in
which nothing is able to enter, not even the light. White holes and black holes would be
linked by a "wormhole", which would transport all the matter absorbed by the black hole,
to a white hole, which in turn would expel the matter inside a black hole. if you take the
metric that describes a wormhole, it is possible to get a white hole from this metric, that
is, the math would allow it.
The idea of a black hole connecting to a white hole through a wormhole would even
resolve the information paradox. The paradox is basically, general relativity says that the
black hole swallows information, and by quantum effects, the black hole evaporates
without giving back that information. Quantum mechanics says that information has to
be conserved anyway. That is, a black hole could not just disappear without returning that
information. but if a black hole took that information and threw it to a white hole on the
other side of the universe, the information would still be preserved. and both relativity
and quantum mechanics are satisfied.
Another theory would be that white holes are black holes when they evaporate. That
would be the idea of loop quantum gravity, which is a proposed idea for the unification
of quantum mechanics and relativity. However, although general relativity explains the
existence of white holes, there is no answer to whether or not these objects could form in
the universe. One of the flaws of this theory is that the equations point out that for a white
hole to exist, it would have to be in a place where it doesn't hear matter, that is, a 100%
empty space. not even a single particle, however small, could exist. if a particle collided
with the white hole, it would become a black hole again.
 However, studying the existence of white holes can be one of the ways to understand
the origin of the universe. Some theoretical physicists even study the same metric that
writes a white hole to understand how the big bang happened. and the reason for this is
very simple, the white hole would be an object that is capable of expelling matter, which
coincides with what was the big bang - an explosion that expelled enough material to
create the universe -. however, it is not proven that the big bang was actually a white hole.
3. CONCLUSION

With the constant advancement of technology, it will be difficult to discover the

answers to questions that we currently consider impossible, from what is inside black
holes to what was in the universe before the big bang. It is important to reflect on the
amount of knowledge and answers we have obtained in just a few years so far. The more
discoveries are made, the more questions end up arising, however, each question that is
asked helps to understand where we came from and what we are made of.
 4. REFERENCES

NASA SCIENCE. Black holes [Online]. Available from:https://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-

areas/black-holes. [Accessed on September 9th, 2022].

Wood Charlie. White holes: What we know about black holes' neglected twins. SPACE.com,
february 24, 2022 [Online] Available from: https://www.space.com/white-holes.html [Accessed on
September 9th, 2022].