Extreme black holes may have hair, find scientists
Researchers discover black holes that violate the uniqueness theorem and have gravitational hair.
Black hole illustration.
Scientists discover that some extreme black holes may violate the no hair theorem.
These black holes feature properties outside of the three classical black hole traits of mass, spin, and charge.
The researchers ran sophisticated simulations to discover these space oddities.
Black holes are wonderfully weird, sparking the imagination with the many mysteries surrounding their formation and functions in our universe. Now scientists found a new kind of extreme black hole, one that breaks the so-called ho hair theorem. In other words, this black hole has hair.
When one is face-to-face with an extreme black hole (why one would be face-to-face with an extreme black hole is a subject of another article), looking at its ‘head’ and admiring its ‘hair’ seem like the last things one should be doing – trying to avoid being sucked into its ‘mouth’ would be tops on this writer’s list. Yet a new study suggests that the first thing one should do when confronting a black hole is to look for hair, because that will identify it as being ‘extreme’. What is an extreme black hole, why does it have hair and who is brave enough to give it a trim?
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IMAGE: Artist s conception of a rotating black hole accreting matter via an accretion disk and emitting a jet. view more
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Black holes are considered amongst the most mysterious objects in the universe. Part of their intrigue arises from the fact that they are actually amongst the simplest solutions to Einstein s field equations of general relativity. In fact, black holes can be fully characterized by only three physical quantities: their mass, spin and charge. Since they have no additional hairy attributes to distinguish them, black holes are said to have no hair : Black holes of the same mass, spin, and charge are exactly identical to each other.