White hole facts for kids
A white hole is a hypothetical region of spacetime which nothing can enter from the outside, although energy-matter, light and information can escape from it.
It is the reverse of a black hole, which can be entered only from the outside and from which energy-matter, light and information cannot escape.
So basically, nothing can be sucked into a white hole and everything gets sucked into a black hole.
Unlike black holes, white holes cannot be continuously observed; rather, their effects can be detected only around the event itself.
The theory says that a black hole region in the future has a white hole region in its past.
Supermassive black holes (SBHs) are predicted to be at the center of every galaxy and that possibly, a galaxy cannot form without one.
Stephen Hawking proposed that these SBHs spawn a supermassive white hole/Big Bang. It's like Newton's third law of motion, it states that for every action in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction.
A 2012 paper argues that the Big Bang itself is a white hole.
In 2014, the idea of the Big Bang being produced by a supermassive white hole explosion was explored in the framework of a five dimensional vacuum.
The theories about white holes haven't been proven yet.
Overview
Like black holes, white holes have properties like mass, charge, and angular momentum. They attract matter like any other mass, but objects falling towards a white hole would never actually reach the white hole's event horizon.
Various hypotheses
There are several theories regarding white holes:
- White holes as a kind of "exit" from black holes, both types of singularities would probably be connected by a wormhole (note that, like white holes, wormholes have not yet been found); when quasars were discovered it was assumed that these were the sought-after white holes but this assumption has now been discarded.
- Another widespread idea is that white holes would be very unstable, would last a very short time and even after forming could collapse and become black holes.
- Israeli astronomers Alon Retter and Shlomo Heller suggest that the GRB 060614 anomalous gamma-ray burst that occurred in 2006 was a "white hole".
- Finally, it has been postulated that white holes could be the temporal inverse of a black hole.
- For this reason, it is also believed that time travel or teleportation may be completed or become more of a reality. This idea supports that through entering a black hole, if you were to somehow survive the shredding of your body, you would be spit out of its counterpart (the white hole) in a different location, perhaps an alternative timeline.
At present, very few scientists believe in the existence of white holes and it is considered only a mathematical exercise with no real-world counterpart.
Physical relevance
To be able to exist, a white hole must either arise from a physical process leading to its formation, or be present from the creation of the universe. None of these solutions appears satisfactory. Also the existence of white holes seems difficult to consider.
Related pages
See also
In Spanish: Agujero blanco para niños
