Emil Mottola cringes every time he hears the words "black hole."
The concept -- having an infinity of energy in a pinpoint -- just doesn't make sense, the Los Alamos National Laboratory astrophysicist says.
Mottola and Pawel Mazur, an astrophysicist at the University of South Carolina, have their own theory about what black holes are, and it has nothing to do with infinite energy.
They call the objects gravistars.
Gravistars are of such great gravitational density that, within them, gravity itself goes through a phase shift -- like water turning to vapor or freezing.
The phase shift creates dark energy inside a real physical bubble that intersects with normal space, and the interaction between the two forces the object to hold its shape, Mottola said.
Dark energy is a mysterious force that many astronomers believe is pushing the substance in the universe farther and farther outward from the central point of the Big Bang. While no astronomer or astrophysicist can say for sure what dark energy is, mathematical calculations and theoretical data have shown it to be a real concept, and it is generally accepted by the scientific community, Mottola said.
Mottola and Mazur have done mathematical calculations on the theoretical existence of gravistars, and so far, they said, the theories hold up.
Proving that gravistars exist might be at least 10 years off, because the two need to add considerably more complexity into those models, and technology must improve before astronomers can see a gravistar closely enough to take a look at what's really happening inside, Mottola said.
One concept included in his mathematical theory is that we all could be living inside of a huge gravistar called "the universe," something that might explain the dark energy that makes up about 70 percent of the universe.
But to understand that, one first must understand what a black hole is.
Traditionally, a black hole is believed to be created after an extremely large star explodes and collapses. After it collapses, more and more material gathers on it until it condenses into a single point of infinite energy and mass.
At a certain distance from this point, light can't even escape, and it gets sucked back toward that point, which astrophysicists call a singularity.
Einstein said in a 1939 paper that he just wasn't comfortable with the concept, and in 1962 another famous scientist, P.A.M. Dirac, raised similar doubts.
Mottola postulates that inside a gravistar is a different type of universe.
In a small gravistar, say the size of a traditional black hole and its radius, atoms get packed together so tightly that they start acting as if they were a single atom bound with the force of dark energy. That mass would push out against a boundary area, where it intersects with normal space. This area is the spot where, in conventional theory, light cannot escape.
"In black hole theory there's nothing there -- there's nothing at that boundary and nothing in the black hole until you get to the center," Mottola said. "In our theory, it's a real physical boundary."
As a gravistar is created, the phase shift would discharge energy in the form of big quantities of gamma rays, which would explain the phenomenon of gamma ray bursts, something astrophysicists haven't been able to explain with the standard models.
"One very speculative idea is that maybe a gravistar could be a much more efficient central engine driving the effects we see in the universe," Mottola said.
"In the classical model, once matter falls in, it's gone. In our model, matter hitting a gravistar would have a physical effect. It should make the boundary vibrate; it should have a spectrum that we can see."
Mottola has been developing his theory for the past 10 years and scientific reaction to it has been mixed.
But he keeps on.
"Nature can do what it wants -- it doesn't depend on any of these theories," he said. "Ultimately we just want to understand what it's doing."
