New Type of Star Can Emerge From Inside Black Holes, Say Cosmologists 193
KentuckyFC writes "Black holes form when a large star runs out of fuel and collapses under its own weight. Since there is no known force that can stop this collapse, astrophysicists have always assumed that it forms a singularity, a region of space that is infinitely dense. Now cosmologists think quantum gravity might prevent this complete collapse after all. They say that the same force that stops an electron spiraling into a nucleus might also cause the collapsing star to 'bounce' at scales of around 10^-14cm. They're calling this new state a 'Planck star' and say its lifetime would match that of the black hole itself as it evaporates. That raises the possibility that the shrinking event horizon would eventually meet the expanding Planck star, which emerges with a sudden blast of gamma rays. That radiation would allow any information trapped in the black hole to escape, solving the infamous information paradox. If they're right, these gamma rays may already have been detected by space-based telescopes meaning that the evidence is already there for any enterprising astronomer to tease apart."
Re:Car analogy time (Score:2, Funny)
Car analogy time:
I have gotten rid of vehicles that sucked less than the Slashdot beta. Seriously even that '85 Bronco II where everything was rusty, none of the body panels matched, and that had bad compression on the #5 cylinder sucked less than beta.slashdot.org.
Bronco's never run well
Not since 1994, anyway. [wikipedia.org]
Remember - if the glove doesn't fit, Slashdot Beta still sucks.
Re:I'm wondering... (Score:4, Funny)
...if a star can emerge from Slashdot Beta. That shit is a black hole of user interface hell.
There is no gravity. BETA just sucks that hard!
Re:Its own weight? (Score:5, Funny)
But how can the black hole's mass go down when particles are being added to it?
Because the mass of that particle, and the particle that escaped, came from the black hole. So there is a net loss of mass. But the probability of this happening is so low that an immense number of eons are needed to evaporate a black hole, and the time required goes up with the cube of the mass. A solar mass black hole may take approx 10^66 years to evaporate [wikipedia.org]. That is because its gravity sucks almost as hard as Slashdot Beta.