[troutman]

Are Black Holes Real?

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/ph...ck-holes-real/

While black holes have gone mainstream, a handful of researchers are investigating exotic ultra-compact stars that, they argue, would look exactly like black holes from afar. Well, almost exactly. Though their ideas have been around for many years, researchers are now putting them to the most stringent tests ever, looking to show once and for all that what looks and quacks like a black hole really is a black hole. And if not? Well, it could just spark the next revolution in physics.

Now, the EHT is about to add a superstar player: the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, a telescope made up of 66 high-precision dishes sited 16,000 feet above sea level in Chile’s clear, dry Atacama desert. With ALMA on board, the EHT will finally be able to make the leap from fitting models to seeing a complete picture of the black hole’s shadow. EHT astronomers are now rounding up time at all of the telescopes so that they can take new data and assemble that first coveted image in 2017.

And if they don’t see what they expect? It could mean that the black hole isn’t really a black hole at all.

That would come as a relief to many theorists. Black holes are mothers of cosmic paradox, keeping physicists up at night with the puzzles they present: Do black holes really destroy information? Do they really contain infinitely dense points called singularities? Black holes are also the battlefield on which general relativity and quantum mechanics clash most dramatically. If it turns out that they don’t actually exist, some physicists might sleep a little better.

But if they’re not black holes, then what could they be?

Most physicists have placed their bets on Saggitarius A* and other candidates being black holes, though. Boson stars and gravastars already have a few strikes against them.