Are Black Holes Actually Dark Energy Stars?

Are Black Holes Actually Dark Energy Stars?

Why one physicist believes our whole understanding of black holes is wrong.

Jesse Stone

But George Chapline, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, doesn’t expect to see a black hole. He doesn’t believe they’re real. In 2005, he told Nature that “it’s a near certainty that black holes don’t exist” and—building on previous work he’d done with physics Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin—introduced an alternative model that he dubbed “dark energy stars.” Dark energy is a term physicists use to describe a peculiar kind of energy that appears to permeate the entire universe. It expands the fabric of spacetime itself, even as gravity attempts to bring objects closer together. Chapline believes that the immense energies in a collapsing star cause its protons and neutrons to decay into a gas of photons and other elementary particles, along with what he refers to as “droplets of vacuum energy.” These form a “condensed” phase of spacetime—much like a gas under enough pressure transitions to liquid—that has a much higher density of dark energy than the spacetime surrounding the star. This provides the pressure necessary to hold gravity at bay and prevent a singularity from forming. Without a singularity in spacetime, there is no black hole.

The idea has found no support in the astrophysical community—over the last decade, Chapline’s papers on this topic have garnered only single-digit citations. His most popular paper in particle physics, by contrast, has been cited over 600 times. But Chapline suspects his days of wandering in the scientific wilderness may soon be over. He believes that the Event Horizon Telescope will offer evidence that dark energy stars are real.