![]() In general, they can only be explicitly solved under highly symmetrical, and hence simplified, circumstances. Physicists and mathematicians then started to give serious consideration to what these extra dimensions might imply for black hole topology.īlack holes are some of the most perplexing predictions of Einstein’s equations - 10 linked nonlinear differential equations that are incredibly challenging to deal with. Little thought was given to extending Hawking’s theorem until the 1980s and ’90s, when enthusiasm grew for string theory - an idea that requires the existence of perhaps 10 or 11 dimensions. (While a black hole is a three-dimensional object, its surface has just two spatial dimensions.) ![]() “So it’s now a matter of waiting to see if our experiments can detect any.” Black Hole DoughnutĪs with so many stories about black holes, this one begins with Stephen Hawking - specifically, with his 1972 proof that the surface of a black hole, at a fixed moment in time, must be a two-dimensional sphere. But if we were to somehow detect such oddly shaped black holes - perhaps as the microscopic products of collisions at a particle collider - “that would automatically show that our universe is higher-dimensional,” said Marcus Khuri, a geometer at Stony Brook University and co-author of the new work along with Jordan Rainone, a recent Stony Brook math Ph.D. It does not tell us whether such black holes exist in nature. The paper demonstrates that Albert Einstein’s equations of general relativity can produce a great variety of exotic-looking, higher-dimensional black holes. Now a new paper goes much further, showing in a sweeping mathematical proof that an infinite number of shapes are possible in dimensions five and above. Over the past two decades, researchers have found occasional exceptions to the rule that confines black holes to a spherical shape. The answer to the latter question, mathematics tells us, is yes. The same holds for black holes - or, to be more precise, the event horizons of black holes - which must, according to theory, be spherically shaped in a universe with three dimensions of space and one of time.īut do the same restrictions apply if our universe has higher dimensions, as is sometimes postulated - dimensions we cannot see but whose effects are still palpable? In those settings, are other black hole shapes possible? Planets and stars tend to be spheres because gravity pulls clouds of gas and dust toward the center of mass. The cosmos seems to have a preference for things that are round.
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