Sunday, January 31, 2016

Inactive Black Holes and Dark Matter

I recently watched the PBS NOVA presentation of the science documentary called "Particle Fever."  The documentary is 99 minutes long, and PBS had a two hour time slot to fill, so they filled it with pieces of some "science cartoons."  They weren't jokey cartoons created to humorously illustrate scientific concepts, they were serious explanations scientists had given to media people on some occasion, and cartoonists had then illustrated those explanations via animation.  I was particularly fascinated by a "cartoon" from 2012 about "dark matter."  I ended up watching it twice, and the next day I did a search on YouTube to see if I could find it there.  I did.  It came from parts of the cartoon below.  (Other parts came from HERE and HERE):


I'd never before heard of "Dark Matter" described as "blobs of stuff."  Dark Matter has never been something I've been particularly fascinated with, so I probably just hadn't been paying serious attention.  I only recalled Dark Matter being described as something unknown, an unknown mass that was only detectable by the gravitational force it exerted on galaxies and elsewhere.  In the above cartoon, at about the 2 minute mark they talk about "strong lensing" and how "blobs" of dark matter will distort what we see if there is a "blob" of dark matter between us and some distant galaxy.


My jaw dropped open.  Somehow I'd never heard Dark Matter described that way before!  I realized it's the same thing that would happen if a black hole was located at that spot!  I could only conclude that, obviously there is some connection between black holes and dark matter!  They might even be the same thing! 

But, I also realized that it wasn't very likely that I would be the first to see that connection.  So, I did a Google search for the difference between black holes and dark matter.  I quickly found an article titled "No direct link between black holes and dark matter."  But it merely argues that scientists don't see any connection between the massive black hole at the center of a galaxy and the dark matter that seems to be embedded among the stars that form the galaxy itself.  That's an answer to a very different question!

Searching further via Google, I found an article titled "Surprising Link Found Between Dark Matter and Black Holes."  It says that there seems to be a relationship between the amount of dark matter scattered around in a galaxy and the size of the black hole at the center of the galaxy.  Another article titled "Dark Matter Guides Growth of Supermassive Black Holes" says the same thing.  That also wasn't what I was looking for.  It discussed questions I wasn't ready to ask.

On a less prestigious source, I found another article titled "Are Black Holes Made of Dark Matter?"  It concludes by arguing that the answer is "No."  But, the question for which I wanted to find the answer was just the reverse: "Is Dark Matter Made from Black Holes?"


Then I found an article titled "Is Dark Matter Made of Tiny Black Holes?"  Except for the word "tiny," it was very close to the question I wanted to ask.  The article contains this information:

The consensus right now is that dark matter consists of a new type of particle, one that interacts very weakly at best with all the known forces of the universe except gravity.  As such, dark matter is invisible and mostly intangible, with its presence only detectable via the gravitational pull it exerts.

However, despite research from thousands of scientists relying on the most powerful particle accelerators on Earth and laboratories buried deep underground, no one has yet detected or created any particles that might be dark matter. This led Kim Griest, an astrophysicist at the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues to investigate black holes as potential dark matter candidates.

The consensus right now is that dark matter consists of a new type of particle, one that interacts very weakly at best with all the known forces of the universe except gravity. - See more at: http://www.space.com/23583-dark-matter-tiny-black-holes.html#sthash.hsEI3xA1.dpuf
Ah!  That fitted very well with the description I gave on my Facebook group for what is at the center of a black hole.  I wrote that "singularities" were just a way of saying there was some unknown factor somewhere, it didn't mean there was actually a "singularity" at the center of a black hole.  And, to me, "portals" into another dimension were just "fictions" that some scientists use to describe what else might be at the center of Black Holes.  It's a mathematical model that cannot be proved or even confirmed.  The way I visualized Black Holes was that they had some kind of "super-dense" matter at their centers.  I wrote:
I imagine that the "super-dense" matter would have to be purified quarks and leptons or whatever smaller particles quarks and leptons might be made of.  It couldn't be atoms. Compressing atoms is what caused the chain reaction that created the black hole in the first place.
I began visualizing Dark Matter as being inactive Black Holes which have gobbled up everything in their vicinity and no longer have anything nearby to grab onto.  Since they aren't pulling in or pulling apart anything, they do not generate the tell-tale X-ray signatures of "active" Black Holes.  And they are too far away from any individual stars to show any noticeable affect on the orbits of individual stars.  Furthermore, they don't have to be "tiny."  They just have to be far enough away from any "food source" that would allow them to become "active."  They're like fish traps in a lake where all the fish have been caught and removed.  The traps still exist, but they're not doing anything.

I wondered if the term "inactive black hole" was something else that others had thought about before.  Sure enough, a Google search found that they had, although "dormant black hole" might be a more common term.  I didn't like the word "dormant," since it implied an habitual routine.  And the articles were far from what I was looking for.  They seem to talk mostly about black holes at the center of galaxies which no longer seem to be spraying out X-rays -- or which no longer spray X-Rays in our direction. 

The way I was seeing things, if one looks at this information logically, the whole idea of dormant or inactive black holes should put an end to all talk of "singularities" and "portals" to other dimensions.  If a black hole were a "singularity" or a "portal," it should disappear when it runs out of fuel and becomes inactive.  Why would the "singularity" exist, and what would keep the "portal" open, if nothing was falling into it or going through it?  Besides, how can there be tiny and super-massive "singularities"?  Anything that is "infinitely small" is just one size: "infinitely small."  There can't be a BIG infinitely small.

And an inactive portal to other dimensions makes no sense, either.  Apparently, the only reason they come up with the idea of a "portal" to another dimension was to explain how all those stars and other material can plunge into a black hole like it was a bottomless pit.  Their answer: it has to come out somewhere else -- in another universe.  But, if it comes out somewhere else, how can the black hole get larger and larger?

It seems to me that the only logical way you can have black holes that come in various sizes, while also having the capability to get larger AND to merge with other black holes, is if everything that falls into a black hole is stripped of all of its electromagnetic properties (i.e., positive and negative charges) so that the remaining particles are electromagnetically neutral and can be stacked together like a pile of bricks - or compressed into a solid ball of inert particles (or maybe Higgs bosons).  It would just be a (temporarily?) stable gravitational mass.  
 
Mathematicians would probably hate that idea.  "Singularities" and "portals" can be converted into mathematics, but they evidently can't mathematically create a stable gravitational mass of the size needed to form a black hole.  And it seems that mathematicians are leading the search to explain what is at the center of a black hole.  Which reminds me of something Albert Einstein once said:

Since the mathematicians have invaded the theory of relativity, I do not understand it myself anymore.
I see two unanswered, interconnected questions: (1) What is at the center of a Black Hole? and (2) What is dark matter?   Those question may need to be answered logically before the answers can be confirmed mathematically.  

Logically, it seems to me that Dark Matter is very likely just inactive Black Holes.  And the centers of all black holes consist of neutral particles (with mass) that can be stacked together (and/or compressed) without any nuclear fusion taking place. (The cartoon says that at one time people thought Dark Matter might just be a collection of neutrinos.  But they decided neutrinos don't have enough mass to account for what was known about Dark Matter.  So, the centers of black holes must also consist of something with more mass.)

Once you form an image of inactive black holes, you can then start visualizing them being slowly drawn together by their massive gravitational force to form larger and larger black holes. 
It seems that, instead of using the Large Hadron Collider to break things apart, the focus should be on how neutral particles can be created and compressed together without causing nuclear fusion.

But, I'm not a scientist.  I'm just a guy who is fascinated by science. 


5 comments:

  1. Kipreos' work could revolutionize physics. No need for dark matter at all if his theory is right.

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    1. From what I've read so far, Edward Kipreos is badly mistaken about Time Dilation.

      "Special relativity is supposed to be reciprocal, where both parties will experience the same time dilation, but all the examples that we have right now can be interpreted as directional time dilation," Kipreos said. "If you look at the GPS satellites, the satellite time is slowing down, but according to the GPS satellites, our time is not slowing down—which would occur if it were reciprocal. Instead, our time is going faster relative to the satellites, and we know that because of constant communication with the satellites."

      Source: http://phys.org/news/2014-12-alternative-explanation-dark-energy.html

      Einstein's 1905 paper on Time Dilation does NOT say "both parties will experience the same time dilation."

      It says, "If at the points A and B of K there are stationary clocks which, viewed in the stationary system, are synchronous; and if the clock at A is moved with the velocity v along the line AB to B, then on its arrival at B the two clocks no longer synchronize, but the clock moved from A to B lags behind the other which has remained at B by ½tv2/c2 (up to magnitudes of fourth and higher order), t being the time occupied in the journey from A to B."

      ONLY CLOCK-A MOVED. CLOCK-B DID NOT MOVE. ONLY CLOCK-A SLOWED DOWN, I.E., EXPERIENCED "TIME DILATION."

      Einstein's paper: http://hermes.ffn.ub.es/luisnavarro/nuevo_maletin/Einstein_1905_relativity.pdf

      Kipreos' paper is here: http://news.uga.edu/documents/Kipreospone0115550.pdf

      It's got too much mathematics for me, but from what I see, Kipreos is VERY mistaken in his understanding of Time Dilation.

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    2. The phys.org article is followed by a LARGE number of comments that were "removed by a moderator." I suspect that they all pointed out that Kipreos' understanding of Einstein's special theory of relativity and Time Dilation is totally screwed up.

      I'm going to try to read Kipreos' article to see just how bad it is. It could be very embarrassing from the University of Georgia: http://news.uga.edu/releases/article/uga-study-possible-alternative-explanation-for-dark-energy-1214/

      A little research finds an article that already DEBUNKS Kipreos' paper: http://galileospendulum.org/2015/01/02/dont-bet-on-the-failure-of-relativity/

      A quote:

      "PLOS ONE is a peer-reviewed journal, but in this case the peer review process failed. As a journal, PLOS takes pride in publishing some papers that are a little speculative in the interests of engaging researchers in post-publication discussion. This paper doesn’t fall into that category: it’s the kind of thing that a sophisticated undergraduate student of physics could see is completely wrong. There is no value in publishing such a thing. I don’t know who peer-reviewed it (and don’t need to), but I find it hard to believe any physicist read and approved of it."

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    3. More links:

      https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-problems-with-the-alternate-explanation-for-dark-energy-from-Prof-Edward-Kipreos

      https://briankoberlein.com/2014/12/27/pay-play/

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    4. One more link I found:

      http://arthur.shumwaysmith.com/life/content/dubious_physics_articles_cast_doubt_on_new_publishers

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