The brilliant mind who discovered the spacetime solution for rotating black holes claims singularities don’t physically exist. Is he right?
Here in our Universe, whenever you gather enough mass together in a small enough volume of space, you’re bound to eventually cross a threshold: where the speed at which you’d need to travel to escape the gravitational pull within that region exceeds the speed of light. Whenever that occurs, it’s inevitable that you’ll form an event horizon around that region, which looks, acts, and behaves exactly like a black hole as seen from the outside. Meanwhile, inside, all that matter gets inexorably drawn towards the central region inside that black hole. With finite amounts of mass compressed to an infinitesimal volume, the existence of a singularity is all but assured.
The predictions for what we should observe outside the event horizon match extraordinarily well with observations, as we’ve not only seen many luminous objects in orbit around black holes, but have even now imaged the event horizons of multiple black holes directly. The theorist who laid the foundation for how realistic black holes form in the Universe, Roger Penrose, subsequently won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020 for his contributions to physics, including for the notion that a singularity must exist at the center of every black hole.
But in a surprising twist, the legendary physicist who discovered the spacetime solution for rotating black holes — Roy Kerr, way back in 1963 — has just written a new paper challenging that idea with some very compelling arguments. Here’s why, perhaps, singularities may not exist within every black hole, and what the key issues are that we should all be thinking about.
Making an ideal black hole
If you want to make a black hole, in Einstein’s General Relativity, all you have to do is take any distribution of pressureless mass — what relativists call “dust” — that starts in the same vicinity and is initially at rest, and let…
