Are Black Holes Actually Dark Energy Stars?

But George Chapline, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, doesn t expect to see a black hole. He doesn t believe they re real. In 2005, he told Nature that it s a near certainty that black holes don t exist and building on previous work he d done with physics Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin introduced an alternative model that he dubbed dark energy stars. Dark energy is a term physicists use to describe a peculiar kind of energy that appears to permeate the entire universe. It expands the fabric of spacetime itself, even as gravity attempts to bring objects closer together. Chapline believes that the immense energies in a collapsing star cause its protons and neutrons to decay into a gas of photons and other elementary particles, along with what he refers to as droplets of vacuum energy. These form a condensed phase of spacetime much like a gas under enough pressure transitions to liquid that has a much higher density of dark energy than the spacetime surrounding the star. This provides the pressure necessary to hold gravity at bay and prevent a singularity from forming. Without a singularity in spacetime, there is no black hole.

via getpocket.com

I read Robert Laughlin’s book A Different Universe and really enjoyed it though much of it I didn’t really understand. This happens to me a lot. It would be awesome if this turned out to be true.