Are Black Holes Actually Black Holes?

A new theory suggests that black holes aren’t black in color, or holes at all! Surprising, I know. According to the theory, black holes may be dark stars with hearts of extremely dense, exotic matter. At the center of a black hole lies what scientists call a singularity, a infinitely small and dense point where the pull of gravity is so strong that it surpasses the speed of light:

The problem? The singularity appears to be physically impossible, because matter isn’t capable of collapsing into an infinitely small point.

Physicists have cleverly dodged this issue by inventing their own singularity-free black holes, which they call “dark stars”. These imaginative creations appear like black holes on the outside, but inside, they contain an extremely (but not infinitely) dense core of matter compressed to the tiniest possible scale, or a “Planck core”. It borrows its name from the incredibly small fundamental unit of measurement called the Planck length, which is on the order of 10^-35 meters, or roughly 100 trillion times smaller than a proton.

Without a singularity at its center, a dark star could theoretically allow light to escape its powerful gravitational grasp. Any light that would escape the black hole would be stretched like a slinky from the dark star’s gravitational pull, an observable phenomenon scientists call redshift.

“In strong gravitational fields, [dark stars] behave interestingly,” physicist Igor Nikitin, of Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Scientific Algorithms and Computing, writes in his new paper, which appears on the preprint server arXiv:

“First of all, the event horizon, typical for real black holes, is erased. Instead, a deep gravitational well is formed, where the values of the redshift become enormously large. As a result, for an external observer the star looks black, like a real black hole.”