{"id":10140,"date":"2022-02-06T13:17:16","date_gmt":"2022-02-06T13:17:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/TheNextWeb=1379692"},"modified":"2022-02-06T13:17:16","modified_gmt":"2022-02-06T13:17:16","slug":"can-black-holes-become-white-holes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/?p=10140","title":{"rendered":"Can black holes become white\u00a0holes?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Can black holes become white holes? \u2013 Remy, age 9, Wangaratta, Victoria<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Hi Remy! Thank you for this great question. The short answer, unfortunately, is no.<\/p>\n

White holes are really just something scientists have imagined \u2014 they could<\/em> exist, but we\u2019ve never seen one, or even seen clues that one may exist. For now, they are an idea.<\/p>\n

To put it simply, you can imagine a white hole as being a black hole in reverse. So if time was running backwards, black holes would look like white holes. But time doesn\u2019t run in reverse in our universe.<\/p>\n

To understand more, let\u2019s start by thinking about how black holes work.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s a black hole?<\/h2>\n

When you drop a tennis ball, it falls to the ground due to what we call gravity. The Earth is very heavy, so it pulls the tennis ball down.<\/p>\n

If Earth had more material inside, making it even heavier, gravity would pull on the ball more strongly. The pull would also be stronger if we stood on the surface of a shrunken Earth, which remained as heavy as it is.<\/p>\n

Now, imagine we\u2019re deep space explorers and we\u2019ve found something out in space that is both extremely heavy and very small. It pulls very strongly on anything that comes close to it, so we keep our spacecraft a safe distance away.<\/p>\n

This mysterious object would pull so powerfully that nothing inside could escape to the outside. A spaceship with the biggest rocket boosters couldn\u2019t escape. Even a laser beam, fired straight out at the speed of light, would not make it to the outside.<\/p>\n

This kind of object is a black hole.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s a white hole?<\/h2>\n

Now imagine we stick around in our spaceship (at a safe distance) and make a movie of this black hole.<\/p>\n

As we watch it, we\u2019d never see anything escape the black hole. We would instead see the black hole eat anything that came too close. We get lucky: as we watch, the black hole swallows an entire star!<\/p>\n

Our movie, titled \u201cBlack hole eats a star\u201d gets a million views online. But now imagine if we played it in reverse. In the backwards movie, we\u2019d see a very heavy, very small object just sitting there \u2013 and then, all of a sudden, spit out an entire star!<\/p>\n

The object we\u2019re looking at now, which spits everything out and eats nothing, would be called a white hole.<\/p>\n

Are there white holes?<\/h2>\n

We have good evidence from our telescopes that black holes really do exist.<\/p>\n

However, we\u2019ve never seen a white hole (which is a shame, because they would be really awesome). The reason astronomers think about white holes at all is because of Albert Einstein \u2013 a great scientist who is no longer alive, but if you\u2019ve ever seen him you may remember his crazy hair.<\/p>\n

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<\/i><\/a>Much of what we know about gravity, and the way it works, is thanks to the amazing work of the scientist Albert Einstein. Image via WikiCommons<\/a><\/figcaption>