White holes seem to function as the reverse of black holes, as if it were a game of Ying Yang. In fact, it is said that a white hole is a place where you can leave but to which you can never return.
It is easy to understand what white holes are, but they only have one small problem: we do not know if they exist beyond the mathematicians’ boards, this is because according to calculations they are possible.
White holes the inverse of black holes
It could be said that landfills are the dream paradise of garbage dumps: everything that enters them disappears from the universe, nothing leaves. However, the solution to Einstein’s equations of general relativity predict the existence of a celestial object as an outward expansion of an object from a singularity: this is a white hole.
To get to the concept of a white hole, we must recognize that general relativity does not care about the flow of time. The equations are time symmetric, which means that the math works perfectly well moving forward or backward in time.
According to the Complutense University of Madrid, in a short period of time, after its formation by the collapse of a material cloud, a black hole would transform into its temporal inverse, that is, into a white one that, instead of preventing For the particles inside to escape, it expels them.
Meaning that if we were to take a movie of the formation of a black hole and run it in reverse, we would find an object that emits radiation and particles. Eventually, it would explode, leaving behind a massive star. This is a white hole, and according to general relativity, this scenario is perfectly fine.
Although, verifying the existence of a white hole would mean verifying phenomena that seem impossible to us for now, such as negative gravity that makes things fall upward, or that time is suspended or runs in reverse.
What would be its characteristics?
- White holes would be even stranger than black holes, having singularities at their centers and event horizons at their boundaries.
- They are massive and gravitating objects.
- Any material that entered a white hole would be immediately ejected at faster than the speed of light, causing the white glow to shine fiercely.
- Anything on the outside of a white hole could never enter, because it would have to travel faster than the speed of light to cross inward through the event horizon.
- The only way to form white holes would be to have some exotic process operating in the early universe that baked the existence of a white hole into the fabric of spacetime itself.
- White holes would also be fantastically unstable. They would still gravitate and attract material toward them, but nothing would be able to cross the event horizons.
Many concerns could be resolved
“The reason to suspect that white holes exist is that they could solve a mystery: what happens at the center of a black hole,” physicist Marco Rovelli, of the Center for Theoretical Physics in Marseille, France, recently wrote on the New Scientist portal.
And, according to experts, white holes could be the same black hole but in the future, or be a source of the so-called “dark energy”, which is what makes the universe expand.