As in, the opposite of a Black Hole? I seem to recall reading about them a few years back but, of course, can’t recall where and perusing my many books can’t find anything about it. IIRC, it was said that a White Hole was where the energy from a Black Hole went…
I know this sounds rather nutty, but is there a study somewhere on this?
Well, there’s this explanation:
from a black hole FAQ I found.
In essence, white holes are regarded as a mathematical quirk with no corresponding physical reality. There doesn’t seem to be any mechanism through which they could form. (Although the destruction of a black hole isn’t necessarily impossible–at least for quantum/low-mass black holes.)
Short answer: No.
“White” holes, as conceptualized in 1965 by the Soviet scientist Igor Novikov and the Israeli physicist Yuval Ne’eman, would be time-reversed version of a black hole. As you recall, a black hole tends to suck up all the matter and energy around it, forever trapping it behind its event horizon, of which nothing can escape. A white hole, on the other hand, would continuously pour out energy and matter from its “antihorizon”, of which nothing can enter. The prevailing theory for the time was black holes and white holes were linked by what are called Kerr tunnels. If, say, you were to enter a black hole in one quadrant of the universe, and managed to survive the trip through the Kerr tunnel, you would exit via the white hole in some other part of the universe. Just imagine the travel opportunities!
Unfotunately, it was too good to last. A physicist named Douglas Eardley analyzed Novikov and Ne’eman’s models, and published his “White Holes Are Shy” Theorem in 1974. Eardley proved that white holes are inherently unstable. The matter and energy a white hole ejects would build up outside its antihorizon, unable to enter. After a short time, the white hole would be surrounded by a dense shield of energy, which Eardley called a “blue sheet”. This sheet causes the space-time region around the antihorizon to become sharply distorted. Eventually, the space becomes so warped that the former antihorizon becomes a true horizon, and from that point on prevents any more material from leaving the hole. Hence, the former white hole is now a black hole.
This conversion process happens fairly rapidly: A white hole of ten solar masses turns into a black hole in less than a thousandth of a second. A white hole of a million masses would take under two minutes.
Conclusion: If there ever was a white hole, it would have turned into a black hole long ago.
Hmmm…this was my hundredth post too. Did I forfeit my right to a post party?
Thanks VERY much for the responses. After tearing my hair out trying to remember where I had read this, I finally found it in one of Jack L. Chalker’s Well World novels. He postulated that the known universe was maintained in a steady state by a master computer that monitored the state of everything. If anything were to happen to make the universe “collapse”, the master program would then punch a hole through the multiverse into the center of the largest black hole it could fin and thus cause a new Big Bang which could then have the computer’s master program written to.
Or something like that…