This article i found on the internet says it all!
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THEY SWALLOW everything
that comes their way and exercise the world’s finest minds, but
the portrayal of black holes as
awe-inspiring celestial menaces
may be woefully inaccurate, a
team of scientists claim. Indeed,
they might not exist at all.
According to the researchers,
the traditional astronomers’
view of a universe liberally sprinkled with invisible, all-consuming black holes should be replaced with an alternative that
sees strange, magnetic balls of
plasma floating in their place.
If the finding is verified — an
event some scientists do not see
on the horizon — would dramatically overturn a theory that
emerged from an English geologist’s calculations in 1784, was
verified by Einstein and confined by four laws drawn up by
Professor Stephen Hawking.
The scientists, lead by Rudy
Schild at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics,
spotted what they claim to be the
death knell for black hole theory
while observing a quasar, lurking nine billion light years from
Earth.
Quasars are believed to have
black holes at their centres, but
to test this assumption, the scientists set up 14 telescopes to
keep an unprecedented watch on
the object. By analysing the gentle flickering of the quasar, the
team were able to probe the
structure of its interior.
They discovered a gaping hole
in a disc of material surrounding
the centre of the quasar, as wide
as 4,000 times the distance from
the earth to the sun. The hole,
they believe, could only be caused
by a vast ejection of material propelled by a strong magnetic field.
Because black holes do not
have magnetic fields, Dr. Schild’s
team suggest in The Astronomical Journal, the quasar must be
powered by a dense ball of plasma called a MECO (magnetospheric
eternally collapsing object). But according to the astronomers’
theories the MECOs'
existence precludes the possibility of black holes.
“I believe this is the first evidence that the whole black hole
paradigm is incorrect,” said Darryl Leiter, a scientist on the team
told the New Scientist.
According to Gerry Gilmore
at Cambridge University's Institute for Astronomy, the theory
has yet to convince most scientists. He pointed to last year's
groundbreaking experiments
that gave the first direct observation of a black hole at the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way.
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Edited by ardnivar
Jan
