The last century of cosmological discovery has revolutionised our understanding of the universe, but as with many things in science, our proposed solutions to problems often soon turn into problems in their own right. Take the physical impossibility of spacetime singularities, the bizarre behaviour of black holes, and the invisible “dark matter” needed to explain the cosmos; as examples of such modern cosmological problems. Phillip B. Levin though, here argues, that all three of these problems can be neatly solved if we consider a new model of black holes – a model where black holes have no singularity.
Over the last century, three questions have confounded the field of theoretical physics. What is the nature of the black hole singularity? What happens at the end of the evaporation process of a black hole? And what is dark matter?
There is remaining mystery in each question today. However, it turns out that all three questions can be connected by a surprisingly simple hypothesis: dark matter consists of the remnants of a very special kind of black hole – a black hole without a singularity – which formed in the very early universe. These nonsingular black holes evaporate like Stephen Hawking thought but then do something surprising: they stop heating up, instead cooling off to form remnants. Due to their special properties, these old and cold remnants may constitute all of the dark matter in the observable universe today, as explained in a new paper on the subject.
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