Dark Energy

2021 ◽  
pp. 79-88
Author(s):  
Gianfranco Bertone

I discuss here black holes, extreme astronomical objects that swallow all forms of matter and radiation surrounding them, and leave behind, as physicist John A. Wheeler said, only their ‘gravitational aura’. These endlessly fascinating objects are the gates where gravity meets quantum physics. Since the pioneering work of scientists like S. Hawking, black holes have become ‘theoretical laboratories’ to explore new physics theories. I discuss how the discovery of gravitational waves from black holes, and the first image of a black hole revealed in 2019, have transformed the study of black holes, and may soon lead to new ground-breaking discoveries. The Universe will disappear. Slowly, it will grow dimmer and dimmer, until it disappears completely.

Author(s):  
Jonathan R Gair

The next decade will very likely see the birth of a new field of astronomy as we become able to directly detect gravitational waves (GWs) for the first time. The existence of GWs is one of the key predictions of Einstein's theory of general relativity, but they have eluded direct detection for the last century. This will change thanks to a new generation of laser interferometers that are already in operation or which are planned for the near future. GW observations will allow us to probe some of the most exotic and energetic events in the Universe, the mergers of black holes. We will obtain information about the systems to a precision unprecedented in astronomy, and this will revolutionize our understanding of compact astrophysical systems. Moreover, if any of the assumptions of relativity theory are incorrect, this will lead to subtle, but potentially detectable, differences in the emitted GWs. Our observations will thus provide very precise verifications of the theory in an as yet untested regime. In this paper, I will discuss what GW observations could tell us about known and (potentially) unknown physics.


Author(s):  
Juan García-Bellido

We review here a new scenario of hot spot electroweak baryogenesis where the local energy released in the gravitational collapse to form primordial black holes (PBHs) at the quark-hadron (QCD) epoch drives over-the-barrier sphaleron transitions in a far from equilibrium environment with just the standard model CP violation. Baryons are efficiently produced in relativistic collisions around the black holes and soon redistribute to the rest of the universe, generating the observed matter–antimatter asymmetry well before primordial nucleosynthesis. Therefore, in this scenario there is a common origin of both the dark matter to baryon ratio and the photon to baryon ratio. Moreover, the sudden drop in radiation pressure of relativistic matter at H 0 / W ± / Z 0 decoupling, the QCD transition and e + e − annihilation enhances the probability of PBH formation, inducing a multi-modal broad mass distribution with characteristic peaks at 10 −6 , 1, 30 and 10 6   M ⊙ , rapidly falling at smaller and larger masses, which may explain the LIGO–Virgo black hole mergers as well as the OGLE-GAIA microlensing events, while constituting all of the cold dark matter today. We predict the future detection of binary black hole (BBH) mergers in LIGO with masses between 1 and 5  M ⊙ , as well as above 80  M ⊙ , with very large mass ratios. Next generation gravitational wave and microlensing experiments will be able to test this scenario thoroughly. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Topological avatars of new physics’.


Author(s):  
John W. Moffat

In 1935, Einstein and Rosen described what is now called the Einstein-Rosen bridge. Wheeler called this a wormhole, which could connect two distant parts of the universe. Thorne and Morris showed the wormhole cannot be traversable unless exotic matter with negative energy props it up. Using the Penrose mechanism of superradiance, one can produce rotational energy from a black hole, which could be used to detect dark matter particles. Higher dimensional objects such as branes in superstring theory have been considered as sources of gravitational waves. Black holes have even been proposed to be giant atoms, related to Hawking radiation and black hole entropy. Bekenstein and Mukhanov postulated that black holes radiated quantum radiation. Many such speculative ideas have been put forth that could potentially be verified by detecting gravitational waves. Yet, many physicists work with mathematical equations, unconcerned with whether their ideas can be verified or falsified by experiments.


2003 ◽  
Vol 12 (09) ◽  
pp. 1675-1680
Author(s):  
LIOR M. BURKO

Black holes are always irradiated by the cosmic background radiation. This captured radiation field determines the physical and geometrical nature of the singularity inside the black hole. We find that non-compact radiation fields (similar to the cosmic background radiation) affect dramatically the singularity, and may determine the fate of a falling astronaut. In particular, the dark energy which accelerates the expansion of the universe determines whether the "tunnel" inside the black hole is blocked, or whether the possibility of using the black hole as a portal for hyperspace travel cannot be ruled out as yet.


2021 ◽  
pp. 53-65
Author(s):  
Gianfranco Bertone

In the second part of the book, I argue that the four biggest mysteries of modern physics and astronomy—dark matter, dark energy, black holes, and the Big Bang—sink their roots into the physics of the infinitely small. And I argue that gravitational waves may shed new light on, and possibly solve, each of these four mysteries. I start here by introducing the problem of dark matter, the mysterious substance that permeates the Universe at all scales and describe the gravitational waves observations that might soon elucidate its nature. The next time you see the Sun shining in the sky, consider this: what blinds your eyes and warms your skin is an immense nuclear furnace, which transforms millions of tons of nuclear fuel into energy every second. And when you contemplate the night sky, try to visualize it for what it essentially is: an endless expanse of colossal natural reactors, forging the atoms that we, and everything that surrounds us, are made of.


Author(s):  
Charles D. Bailyn

Emitting no radiation or any other kind of information, black holes mark the edge of the universe—both physically and in our scientific understanding. Yet astronomers have found clear evidence for the existence of black holes, employing the same tools and techniques used to explore other celestial objects. This book goes behind the theory and physics of black holes to describe how astronomers are observing these enigmatic objects and developing a remarkably detailed picture of what they look like and how they interact with their surroundings. Accessible to undergraduates and others with some knowledge of introductory college-level physics, this book presents the techniques used to identify and measure the mass and spin of celestial black holes. These key measurements demonstrate the existence of two kinds of black holes, those with masses a few times that of a typical star, and those with masses comparable to whole galaxies—supermassive black holes. The book provides a detailed account of the nature, formation, and growth of both kinds of black holes. The book also describes the possibility of observing theoretically predicted phenomena such as gravitational waves, wormholes, and Hawking radiation. A cutting-edge introduction to a subject that was once on the border between physics and science fiction, this book shows how black holes are becoming routine objects of empirical scientific study.


Author(s):  
Xueyi Tian

The black hole information paradox is one of the most puzzling paradoxes in physics. Black holes trap everything that falls into them, while their mass may leak away through purely thermal Hawking radiation. When a black hole vanishes, all the information locked inside, if any, is just lost, thus challenging the principles of quantum mechanics. However, some information does have a way to escape from inside the black hole, that is, through gravitational waves. Here, a concise extension of this notion is introduced. When a black hole swallows something, whether it is a smaller black hole or an atom, the system emits gravitational waves carrying the information about the “food”. Although most of the signals are too weak to be detected, the information encoded within them will persist in the universe. This speculation provides an explanation for a large part, if not all, of the supposed “information loss” in black holes, and thus reconciles the predictions of general relativity and quantum mechanics.


Author(s):  
David M. Wittman

General relativity explains much more than the spacetime around static spherical masses.We briefly assess general relativity in the larger context of physical theories, then explore various general relativistic effects that have no Newtonian analog. First, source massmotion gives rise to gravitomagnetic effects on test particles.These effects also depend on the velocity of the test particle, which has substantial implications for orbits around black holes to be further explored in Chapter 20. Second, any changes in the sourcemass ripple outward as gravitational waves, and we tell the century‐long story from the prediction of gravitational waves to their first direct detection in 2015. Third, the deflection of light by galaxies and clusters of galaxies allows us to map the amount and distribution of mass in the universe in astonishing detail. Finally, general relativity enables modeling the universe as a whole, and we explore the resulting Big Bang cosmology.


1998 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-41
Author(s):  
I.D. Novikov

Some 30 years ago very few scientists thought that black holes may really exist. Attention focussed on the black hole hypothesis after neutron stars had been discovered. It was rather surprising that astrophysicists immediately ‘welcomed’ black holes. They found their place not only in the remnants of supernova explosions but also in the nuclei of galaxies and quasars.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rui feng Zheng ◽  
Jia ming Shi ◽  
Taotao Qiu

Abstract It is well known that primordial black hole (PBH) can be generated in inflation process of the early universe, especially when the inflaton field has some non-trivial features that could break the slow-roll condition. In this paper, we investigate a toy model of inflation with bumpy potential, which has one or several bumps. We found that potential with multi-bump can give rise to power spectra with multi peaks in small-scale region, which can in turn predict the generation of primordial black holes in various mass ranges. We also consider the two possibilities of PBH formation by spherical collapse and elliptical collapse. And discusses the scalar-induced gravitational waves (SIGWs) generated by the second-order scalar perturbations.


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