White Holes.
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. — Albert Einstein.
We always wonder if our world will have opposites of every object/matter present in the universe. Be it an atom that consists of both protons and neutrons, with the virtues, comes the vices in a person, with the positive matter comes the negative matter probably required for creating or stabilizing a wormhole, etc. So, what if we have a twin of the most mysterious object in the universe i.e. a black hole? What will happen inside or at its termination? What role will it may or might not play in the universe or to be specific, the universe that we live in? What if there’s such a twin of the black hole existing in some other universe? Fascinating right? All these questions led the scientists to think of an exact opposite twin of a black hole. A White Hole.
What are White Holes?
As the name suggests, they are the complete opposite of their twin, a black hole. Just as nothing can escape a black hole’s gravitational field, nothing can enter a white hole.
If we consider a spaceship crew who are watching from afar or approaching a hole (probably the crew won’t know which type it is :D), ideally it will look like a black hole, and have the same mass. But they will see an impossible event happening. They will see matter being thrown out of that hole which is impossible for a black hole to happen since it sucks everything it takes in beyond the event horizon. At that moment, little will they know that they have seen a white hole!
White holes are also considered a time-reversal video of a black hole. While a black hole’s event horizon is a place of no return, a white hole is a place of no admission. No spacecraft will ever reach the region’s edge.
Objects can leave the hole and interact with the outside world. But since nothing can get in, the interior is cut off from the universe’s past: No outside event will ever affect the inside.
Whereas in the case of a black hole, the interior event won’t affect anything outside.
I think it’s a bit exciting as well as scary to imagine that about a white hole since if a particular object is coming out of a white hole, we won’t be able to predict its consequences affecting our universe.
How are they formed?
Well, even the scientists are researching! It’s quite a novel and imaginary concept, for now, so the researchers are wracking their brains over what can create white holes. One possibility that Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist at Aix-Marseille University in France, and his team have suggested is that white holes might be born from black holes themselves.
Since black holes evaporate their mass by emitting radiation called ‘Hawking Radiation’, Rovelli suggested that once a black hole evaporates to a point where further it can’t be shrunk in the fabric of space-time, the dying black hole would then rebound and try to throw everything outside instead of taking in, thus forming a white hole.
General relativity does describe the possibility of a white hole, but we don’t know how it will be formed. The reason is everything gets reversed in a white hole. Its physics works opposite to our parent universe.
It doesn’t make sense to see an event horizon of a white hole burst into a fully functional star or any astronomical object. It is like putting together broken pieces of a pie after we have squashed it or joining the pieces of an apple after cutting it.
Also, as per the law of entropy, the universe is going to get messier and hotter over time. This again doesn’t make sense in white holes because, instead of getting destroying itself, the object is created again. Opposite of chaos.
Well, I have a small theory after researching it. What if white holes exist in some other universe if we look at it from the point of view of the multiverse theory? What if they are the future fate of our universe after black holes die? (This possibility is tough because if this happens white holes might be for only a short period) This might answer where all the information inside the black hole goes into the singularity. The answer might be a white hole :)!
There are many more baffling questions out there regarding white holes but let’s hope we get those answers soon. In the meantime, there’s scope for so many imaginary theories surrounding it!
Even though it’s still a theoretical concept, we can’t help being curious about it being out there!
Just because, we haven’t seen it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
A few years ago, we didn’t have a real picture of a black hole. The theoretical physicists were considered insane to study it without the support of experimental evidence. But 2019, we saw our first image of a black hole. And recently, we were able to see another image of the black hole at the center of our Milky way galaxy.
We are truly fortunate to see and be a part of these breakthroughs!
PS: Below is the picture of the newly captured image :D
We never know, might see a white hole too! If not, it will be one of those interesting theories for trying to understand our universe!
Writing after months. A special thanks to one of my friends who suggested this topic to me! Even though there’s always more to read, research and write especially when we talk about physics or space, this was just a small one on the neglected twin of a black hole — a white hole.
Hope you enjoyed reading it!
