Researcher shows that black holes do not exist

This artist's concept depicts a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy. 

The blue colour here represents radiation pouring out from material very close to the black hole. 

The grayish structure surrounding the black hole, called a torus, is made up of gas and dust. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Black holes have long captured the public imagination and been the subject of popular culture, from Star Trek to Hollywood.

They are the ultimate unknown, the blackest and most dense objects in the universe that do not even let light escape, and as if they weren't bizarre enough to begin with, now add this to the mix: they don't exist.

By merging two seemingly conflicting theories, Laura Mersini-Houghton, a physics professor at UNC-Chapel Hill in the College of Arts and Sciences, has proven, mathematically, that black holes can never come into being in the first place.

The work not only forces scientists to reimagine the fabric of space-time, but also rethink the origins of the universe.

"I'm still not over the shock," said Mersini-Houghton. "We've been studying this problem for a more than 50 years and this solution gives us a lot to think about."

For decades, black holes were thought to form when a massive star collapses under its own gravity to a single point in space, imagine the Earth being squished into a ball the size of a peanut, called a singularity.

So the story went, an invisible membrane known as the event horizon surrounds the singularity and crossing this horizon means that you could never cross back.

It's the point where a black hole's gravitational pull is so strong that nothing can escape it.

The reason black holes are so bizarre is that it pits two fundamental theories of the universe against each other.

Einstein's theory of gravity predicts the formation of black holes but a fundamental law of quantum theory states that no information from the universe can ever disappear.

Efforts to combine these two theories lead to mathematical nonsense, and became known as the information loss paradox.

In 1974, Stephen Hawking used quantum mechanics to show that black holes emit radiation.

Since then, scientists have detected fingerprints in the cosmos that are consistent with this radiation, identifying an ever-increasing list of the universe's black holes.

But now Mersini-Houghton describes an entirely new scenario. She and Hawking both agree that as a star collapses under its own gravity, it produces Hawking radiation.

However, in her new work, Mersini-Houghton shows that by giving off this radiation, the star also sheds mass. So much so that as it shrinks it no longer has the density to become a black hole.

Before a black hole can form, the dying star swells one last time and then explodes. A singularity never forms and neither does an event horizon.

The take home message of her work is clear: there is no such thing as a black hole.

The paper, which was recently submitted to ArXiv, an online repository of physics papers that is not peer-reviewed, offers exact numerical solutions to this problem and was done in collaboration with Harald Peiffer, an expert on numerical relativity at the University of Toronto.

An earlier paper, by Mersini-Houghton, originally submitted to ArXiv in June, was published in the journal Physics Letters B, and offers approximate solutions to the problem.

Experimental evidence may one day provide physical proof as to whether or not black holes exist in the universe, but for now, Mersini-Houghton says the mathematics are conclusive.

Many physicists and astronomers believe that our universe originated from a singularity that began expanding with the Big Bang.

However, if singularities do not exist, then physicists have to rethink their ideas of the Big Bang and whether it ever happened.

"Physicists have been trying to merge these two theories, Einstein's theory of gravity and quantum mechanics, for decades, but this scenario brings these two theories together, into harmony," said Mersini-Houghton. "And that's a big deal."

More information: Mersini-Houghton's ArXiv papers: Approximate solutions: arxiv.org/abs/arXiv:1406.1525 Exact solutions: arxiv.org/abs/arXiv:1409.1837

'Supersymmetry' Could Be The Next Next Big Thing In Physics

Physicists said the next big thing in the world of particle physics will be the extension of the standard model of particle physics known as supersymmetry or SUSY.

According to a team of researchers, the better understanding of the universe will lead to the outgrowth of the discovery of the Higgs boson, and will lead to the discovery of its extension, the SUSY.

University of Oklahoma researchers said SUSY predict new matter states or super partners for each matter particle already accounted for in the standard model.

Physicists Howard Baer, Homer L. Dodge Professor of High Energy Physics in the OU Department of Physics and Astronomy, and his colleagues were the first in the world to show what SUSY matter might look like at colliding beam experiments.

Earlier reports said the Large Hadron Collider has not been successful so far in finding SUSY, while Atlas and CMS experiments is expected to provide new analysis on SUSY in March 2012.

The LHC will reportedly double the energy required to prove the SUSY theory.

Baer, who has studied SUSY for 25 years, said the discovery of the Higgs boson will open the door to a whole new world of super particles. "Finding the Higgs boson is like looking for a needle in a haystack, but the Higgs boson is only the tip of the iceberg of SUSY matter," Baer said.

"With SUSY, we are talking about the next level of the laws of physics. If there is SUSY, then we will find super partners, which will provide a new perspective for the origin and evolution of the universe. At that point, we can say we are on the road to a much deeper comprehension of nature, " Baer added.

The researchers said SUSY may be the next big step in understanding cosmology and the origin of dark matter, the so-called invisible particles that dominate the matter density of the universe

WSU Researchers Use a 3D Printer to Make Bone-like Material - YouTube

It looks like bone. It feels like bone. For the most part, it acts like bone and it came off an inkjet printer.

A ceramic powder and 3D printer have been paired to create a bone-like material that could be used in surgery within the next decade.

The material, which has already been tested in vivo tests on rats and rabbits, could be created to order for dental and orthopedic procedures.

Once inserted in the body, it acts as a scaffold for new human bone cells to grow upon after just a week.

The manmade scaffold will eventually dissolve "with no apparent ill effects".

The material was created following a four-year effort by chemistry, materials science, biology and manufacturing researchers at Washington State University.

The main "ingredient" is calcium phosphate but silicon and zinc were added, which "more than doubled the strength of the main material," the team explained.

Inside the printer, an inkjet nozzle sprays a plastic binder liquid over a bed of the powder in layers of 20 microns.

Susmita Bose, co-author of the paper revealing the results of the project and professor in WSU's School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering says that custom-ordered replacement bone tissue could be in common use in the next ten years.

"If a doctor has a CT scan of a defect, we can convert it to a CAD file and make the scaffold according to the defect," she said.

Brocolli's Cancer fighting properties

Researchers already knew that a chemical found in broccoli, cauliflower, and related vegetables, called isothiocyanate, appeared to stop the growth of cancer by causing apoptosis, or cell death, in cancer cells. But researchers didn't know why.

Recent research at Georgetown University found that isothiocyanate sticks to a defective protein found in cancerous cells.

The broccoli-born chemical only binds to the protein when it is defective. The normal version is left alone.

Production of the protein in question is controlled by the gene p53. It normally helps stop a cell from replicating uncontrollably. But when gene p53 is mutated, the protein comes out defective.

Not only that, cells with mutated p53 genes are also more resistant to chemical cancer treatments.
P53 mutations occur in half of all human cancers, including lung, breast and colon.

Eating your broccoli may help reduce cancer risks because the presence of isothiocyanate was observed to increase the death rate of cancer cells with the p53 mutation.

Researchers found that after the cauliflower chemical, isothiocyanate, bound to the defective p53 protein, breast cancer cells died. One reason for this may be that the mutated gene also makes the cancerous cells vulnerable to toxic effects from isothiocyanate that normal cells are resistant to.

NASA's Quest for space life a focus for the future

US space agency NASA is pondering 28 potential missions focusing on finding life beyond Earth inside our solar system, a US researcher said Wednesday.

"Astrobiology and the search for life is really central to what we should be doing next in the exploration of the solar system," Steve Squyres, a researcher at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, said in a telephone press briefing.

"We are looking for a total of 28 different missions.... They cover everything from Mercury landers to fly-by of objects in deep outer space of the solar system -- and they are particularly relevant to looking for life," he explained.

Among other objects of interest: a three-stage Martian mission that would bring Martian soil samples back to Earth, said Squyres, who worked on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, still active six years after their arrival on the Red Planet.

"Those samples might reveal a great deal of whether Mars once or today (has) forms of life," he said.

Another part of the mission would be to look at the origin of methane in the planet's atmosphere, and whether or not it is organic, he said.

Methane breaks down quickly in the Martian atmosphere, but scientists discovered plumes of methane on Mars in 2003, raising the prospect that the planet is not entirely dead.

"So we will send a mission potentially to look at the sources of the methane and consider the possibility that they could be from biological origins," Squyres added.

Further out in the solar system, scientists are very interested in Europa, a moon of Jupiter, he said.

"It's believed that Europa may have an ocean of liquid water underneath its icy crust. And we are looking at a Europa robot mission that would have, among other things, the capability to use a radar system that can penetrate through that ice, find the ocean if it exists, identify places where you might go to the surface to learn more" about the ocean, Squyres said.

Likewise Titan, a moon of Saturn, has scientists' attention.

It is "a moon we know to be very rich in organic materials. We are looking long term at a mission that will study Titan in great deal, including an orbiter, a balloon in Titan atmosphere and a lander to land in some of the lakes of liquid methane," the Cornell scientist added.

Another mission under consideration is one to return samples from a comet, the researcher said. "Comets are believed to be rich in organic materials, rich in building blocks of life. Most of the organic material on earth was probably delivered to earth by comets."

The number of projects needs to be whittled down, he said, before a recommendation will be made on what missions NASA should prioritise.

Ötzi the iceman: Leaves a Wealth of Knowledge

Ötzi is a mummified human discovered in 1991 in the Schnalstal glacier in the Alps, on the border between Austria and Italy. He died around 3300 BC.

The mummy offers a wealth of information about the humans living in Europe at the time. Ötzi was named after the Ötztal region where he was found.

The new EURAC Iceman photoscan website now gives all web users access to images of the body gathered by researchers. The site has a dynamic online-map-style interface to let people zoom into photographs that capture Ötzi from all angles and show details as small as 1 millimetre.

(Image: © South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology / Eurac / Marco Samadelli / Gregor Staschitz)