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Black holes may reflect echoes

When two neutron stars collided far inspace, gravitational waves arising from such a powerful concussion, headed towards the Earth. Having traveled several millions and billions of kilometers, the waves were discovered in 2017, when scientists, looking at the records of gravitational waves, found evidence of the existence of a black hole that violates all laws of physics. According to an article published on livescience.com, the discovery of this unusual object casts doubt on Einstein's general theory of relativity. So what's wrong with the black hole found?

Black hole discovered in 2017 may violate all the laws of familiar physics

The oddities of black holes

In the general theory of relativity, black holes aresimple objects: infinitely compressed singularities or specific points of matter, surrounded by smooth event horizons through which neither light, nor energy, nor any other physical substance can pass. Until now, every bit of data collected by black hole scientists has supported this familiar and familiar model.

But in the 1970s, Stephen Hawking wrote a seriesworks in which he suggested that the boundaries of black holes are not so smooth. Instead, they are very blurred due to a number of phenomena associated with quantum mechanics that allow Hawking radiation to evaporate. In the following years, several other models of black holes appeared in which these smooth, perfect event horizons would be replaced by thinner and blurry membranes. In one of their latest theories, physicists have predicted that this fog will be especially intense around newly formed black holes and will be significant enough to reflect gravitational waves, producing a kind of echo. The black hole discovered in 2017 can serve as real proof of this hypothesis. So, experts say that what was previously considered a silent space monster, attracting even the smallest particles of light and time itself to its surroundings, actually rings like an echo of a bell, thus destroying the simple physics of black holes.

See also: A black hole in the center of our galaxy turns stars into something strange

The collision of two neutron stars can lead to the appearance of a black hole

Niaesh Afshordi, a physicist at the University of Waterloo atCanada, argues that according to Einstein's theory of relativity, there should be no bulk material near a black hole reflecting gravitational waves. Even those black holes that surround themselves with disks of material, as a rule, have an empty zone right around their event horizons. Nevertheless, the data from existing gravitational wave detectors show that such a familiar rule does not always work for us. The discovery of the cosmic “echo” in this case is direct evidence of the falsity of this theory.

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However, not all experts support the idea ofthat we will soon have to revise the usual knowledge in the field of physics. Maksimiliano Izi, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, believes that even if the echo really exists, scientists are not able to prove with absolute accuracy that the object that caused the cosmic echo was really a black hole. Instead, any other exotic object formed after the collision of neutron stars could well have arisen. So, this short-lived intermediate object could be the remainder of a hypermassive star collapsing after a collision for a second or so. The result of such a phenomenon was the detected echo, which reached the Earth hundreds of millions of light years after a grand cosmic event.