• Question: Do quasars exist or white holes?

    Asked by Neliporto to Alice, Bose, Christian, Emma, Steve on 9 Mar 2016. This question was also asked by cyoung.
    • Photo: Alice Harpole

      Alice Harpole answered on 9 Mar 2016:

      Quasars do exist! They are some of the most energetic things we have ever observed in the universe, and are thought to be powered by events such as galaxies and supermassive black holes colliding. Most quasars that we have seen were formed about 12 billion years ago, or about 2 billion years after the Big Bang. This means that we can use them to ‘look back in time’ at the early universe, and they can even be used to measure how the universe is expanding.

      White holes on the other hand almost certainly do not exist. They are a mathematical solution of the same equations that describe black holes, and are kind of the opposite – instead of sucking in matter, they expel it. However, there is no physical process by which they could form (and they break several important physical laws such as conservation of entropy), so they most likely do not exist in our universe.

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