• Question: Are white holes real or hypothetical

    Asked by Pele Pitbury to Alice, Bose, Christian, Emma, Steve on 10 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Alice Harpole

      Alice Harpole answered on 10 Mar 2016:

      They are almost certainly hypothetical, at least in our universe! White holes are a solution of the same equations that describe black holes, and are pretty much the opposite: while black holes suck in matter, white holes expel it. However, there is no known physical process by which they could actually form and they break several important laws of physics (such as the conservation of entropy).

    • Photo: Benjamin Bose

      Benjamin Bose answered on 11 Mar 2016:

      Basically reiterating what Alice has already said , white holes are a consequence of the maths of Einstein’s theory of gravity. The interpretation of that maths gives us an object that spits out matter and energy just as black holes suck it up.

      Again as Alice said, they violate some important laws of physics and have not been observed, but that does not mean one could not cook up some theory where they exist in some parallel universe – they’re definitely food for imagination 🙂

      Maybe the lesson is, a theory can lead you to a lot of ‘unphysical’ solutions even if that theory is the greatest theory we have. I put unphysical in inverted comas because sometimes this unphysical-ness can just be an indication of incompleteness in the theory.

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