"Burning Walls" May Stop Black Hole Formation

KentuckyFC writes "Black holes are thought to form when a star greater than 4 times the mass of the Sun explodes in a supernova and then collapses. The force of this collapse is so great that no known force can stop it. In less massive stars, the collapse cannot overcome so-called neutron degeneracy, the force that stops neutrons from being squashed together. Now a Russian physicist says another effect may be involved. He points out that quantum chromodynamics predicts that when neutrons are squashed together, matter undergoes a phase transition into "subhadronic" matter. This is very different from ordinary matter. In subhadronic form, space is essentially empty. So the phase change creates a sudden reduction in pressure, forcing any ordinary matter in the star to implode into this new vacuum. The result is a massive increase in temperature of this matter that creates a "burning wall" within the supernova. And it is this burning wall that stops the formation of a black hole, not just the degeneracy pressure of neutrons. This should lead to much greater energies inside a supernova than had been thought possible until now. And that's important because it could explain the formation of high energy gamma ray bursts that have long puzzled astrophysicists."

I love this kind of story

[Alcimedes]

I never like when scientists can't explain a major aspect of something like a black hole. They have models/predictions etc., but there are these little pieces that are missing.

Then someone comes along with an elegant solution that fits perfectly into the existing theory/model/design and suddenly all these unexplained pieces make perfect sense.

That is what science is about. Revelation based on fact, not faith. At the end of the day I think it's a lot more rewarding, although a lot harder to come by.

Re:I love this kind of story

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, he just put forth a possible explanation without any hard data to back it up. People have done the same in the past, only to have the observations go against their hypotheses. Building a hypothesis is only half the battle; you still need to gather evidence to support it.

Re:I love this kind of story

[Anonymous Coward]

an elegant solution that fits perfectly into the existing theory/model/design and suddenly all these unexplained pieces make perfect sense.

Sounds like faith to me... Where's the observation of facts in the above?

You don't observe facts, you observe phenomena.

Faith requires neither facts, nor observation. You just say something like "Hey, it runs on turtle oil, because the Big Man said it does" and let that stand on its own merit.

Re:I love this kind of story

[steelfood]

There's nothing wrong with faith per se, except when it interferes with observable reality. But it's not faith because it's recognized as one of many possibilities and has a probability attached to it.

What you're seeing is that this possibility is the most probable, which is why it is favored over the other myriad of possibilities. But when some new data comes along, this idea may be strengthened or weakened, and it may eventually lose its favored status to another possibility. Sometimes, but relatively rarely, a possibility is so probable that it becomes generally irrefutable (but the minutae are usually still in the works), in which case, it becomes theorem a.k.a. fact.

Of course, even facts can be changed with new data. "Refined" is probably the correct term. Facts don't get turned upside down, but they may get marginalized, or slotted into a larger, more general fact, or pieces may be replaced with better ideas. For example, gravity being the 4th fundamental force is a fact, but the mechanism behind gravity isn't understood. So some data may come along to explain gravity, or to turn gravity into one of the other 3 fundamental forces, or to make gravity only a small part of a much larger 4th fundamental force. But since no such data exists as of now, gravity remains as it is.

That is science.

Re:Scientific method to the rescue

[michaelwv]

That's exactly what we will do. This hypothesis will be quantified into making predictions about what we will see from supernovae and gamma-ray bursts (and perhaps other events). We will then plan and conduct observations of these events and see if the predictions of this hypothesis are consistent with the new data. A lot of interesting ideas like this come out but then stall for a while as people try translate qualitative ideas into quantitative predictions. Once that happens we can go out and test them.

Re:I love this kind of story

[NAR8789]

What?! No! The heart of science is not fitting hypotheses to data. That's the sort of dangerous fallacy that produces Aristotle's "science", and in fact what dangerous fundamentalists thrive on. The thing that sets science apart is rigorous, repeatable empirical testing of not previously observed predictions. Not to say that the hypothesis in the article isn't exciting, but the already raising it up as a shining example of scientific triumph starts down a path I find terrifying.

Re:Scientific method to the rescue

[Lokitoth]

It does, however, require a bit more than being one that "sounds like something invented by a writer for a Japanese cartoon series."

"Experimental Astrophysics"?

[John Hasler]

That's where you set off a bunch of supernova with different intitial conditions and compare the results with theory?

Re:I love this kind of story

[Hal_Porter]

Well Einstein was offended by the hackiness of Quantum Mechanics to the point where he thought it must be incorrect. However, he was wrong.

As far as I can tell there's no reason the universe has to abide by rules that we consider elegant. In the fact elegant seems to be a subjective thing.

Then again maybe there's a much more elegant theory will be discovered that can explain all the results General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics do and more and will be simpler than each of them.

I don't know. And neither does anyone else.