Black Holes, they look like something out of a horror movie. They sit in an area of space, completely invisible, with a ring of material swirling around them that is being sucked in and crushed at the atomic level. Nothing can escape the pull of these ferocious beasts. Their hunger for material seems to be insatiable. If one were to make a list of their worst nightmares, being dragged into a black hole would have to be somewhere near the top of the list. Since black holes have been suspected of existing, their physics has been thought to be the same. What I mean is that the theory of how they operate hasn't changed very much. To put it as simple as possible, they are thought of as huge vacuum cleaners that suck in everything within their reach, only these vacuum cleaners can pulverize anything that gets too close. Black holes have fascinated scientists ever since they were discovered.

A movie was even made about a black hole in 1979 and appropriately it was named The Black Hole. Disney made it and incorporated much of what a black hole was thought to be at the time, into the film. It took place in a ship that was standing off from the black hole just far enough as not to be pulled in. It sort of had overtones of other dimensions, but maybe that was just how I felt about it. If we could ever harness the power of one of these things, we would be almost God like. Let's look at that point a little closer. There is so much power involved with a black hole, that we might be able to actually build a solar system from it someday. One has to wonder if there are black holes in the universe that are far larger than anything that we think exists today? If there are, could they be effecting the expansion of the universe? Maybe there is one so huge that it is attracting us to it and forcing the universal expansion, or maybe a group of giant black holes exist that are using combined attraction and maybe that expansion has nothing to do with a big bang, as most scientists think? This is just sheer speculation on my part, but you have to admit that anything is possible. As long as we are speculating, maybe there are some very weak black holes out there. We might even be inside one. I guess I'd better stop with this right here.

Sometimes classic views of things are not challenged because they fit into the scientific framework. If something is found that scientists feel CAN'T BE, because it doesn't fit into the current boundaries of our physics, it might be discarded, just as discoveries of ancient tools and human bones are, that science deems too old because it would date the existence of man too far back before the accepted date. Could there be a theory about black holes that fits into these categories? Funny you should ask, because there is exactly that, a theory that would knock the scientific community on its collective ear, if it turns out to be correct. You know what? This is just what the scientific community needs once in a while. They have to be proven wrong or there would be no advancement in the fundamental laws. Science worships men like Einstein and there is no doubt that he was one of the greatest geniuses that ever lived, but does that mean he was perfect? No one is perfect and I think that it is time that they all realized that, although he does have a pretty high score on the perfection chart.

Some scientists from Duke and Cambridge Universities believe that we might be wrong in our ideas of what black holes are, or at least what some of them are. This is quite a bold statement when you consider that they are bucking most other scientists. They think that a black hole may not be black at all and that it might be a singularity. When we talk of singularities you have to think of things like stars that have collapsed into something so dense, that its gravitational pull is enormous They are proposing that a black hole is something like that. This theory just happens to go completely against the law of physics, so you can imagine that those other scientists are not very happy about it. The problem is that this goes completely against the theory of General Relativity. General Relativity is the holy grail and those that tread on it will suffer, metaphorically speaking. Here is the strange thing, no scientist has ever been able to prove that a black hole is really black, they just discern this by indirect evidence. You see there is matter all around a black hole that obscures it completely. That is just one of those little known facts that I like to throw out.

Scientists have suggested in papers, ways of penetrating the black hole debris, but unfortunately this would only work for non spinning singularities and all the black holes seem to be spinning, some as fast as 1,000 times a second, so this doesn't help much. I have to say that this blows my mind. I just can't imagine an object spinning that fast. An expert on gravitational lensing was called in from Rutgers University and it was determined that if a singularity was spinning a few thousand times a second and weighed about 10 times more than our sun, it could get rid of its event horizon and be exposed. The event horizon is the stuff swirling around it. This work is now being supported by the National Science Foundation in the United States and the Science and Technology Facilities Council in the United Kingdom, This is an indication that maybe there are naked singularities out there and we could have even seen them and not realized that they were the same stuff as a black hole with no event horizon. That would be quite a find.

Massive Black Hole
Graphic Source: NASA-JPL

So the question has to be asked, how would we know it if we found that singularity? If it exists, we have probably been looking at it for years without realizing what it was. Well scientific calculations have been made that show that this type of singularity would leave clues, but you have to know what to look for. The light of the background stars and galaxies would be effected, thus indicating what we were looking at. Special instruments are being designed to pick this up, but existing instruments are capable of detecting this manually.

Not all the scientists working on the project believe that these singularities exist, but they are willing to try and find out. I guess you could say that they are giving the benefit of the doubt to those that do believe. When I look at this picture I have to wonder if these singularities do exist, will they be in three or more different stages:
1.Pre black hole
2. Black Hole
3 Post black hole
I am talking about when they are formed before they acquire a debris disk, after they become what we think of as black holes and after they lose their debris disk. I wonder if it will be possible to tell if the singularity is in stage 1 or stage 3?

I don't know about you, but black holes have always held my interest, there is just something about them that seems mystical. You have to wonder what else we are going to find out in space that may be even more bizarre. If the black hole theory that states that black holes are singularities turns out to be wrong and the original theory holds up, then science thinks that there must be white holes also. That is where everything comes out that is sucked in. Some say that it will be in another dimension. Who knows, but it is an interesting thought.