Did We Detect a White Hole?

Take the number 25. The square root of 25 can be 5, but it can just as easily be -5. As two solutions to the field equations, both black and white holes stirred and excited scientists at the time, though only one went on to be well known. Image: ESA/V. Beckmann.

Black holes are fascinating monsters. They shred stars and planets as massive as Jupiter, spinning wild enough to capture everything within their mysterious caverns. Once past their event horizons, nothing can escape. One even dwells at the center of our galaxy and possibly at the center of almost all the galaxies we see harbored in the night sky. They are, without doubt, one of the most powerful objects in the universe. And yet, as little as we know about them and as fascinating as they are, it’s their counterparts which prove even more elusive and more exciting to consider.

Not long after Einstein introduced the world to general relativity in the early 1900’s, there emerged the foundation for black holes and their mathematical opposites — white holes. Einstein himself didn’t predict them; he thought the extreme nature of black holes was far too outlandish to investigate. Yet to other scientists they became big points of interest.

At their very essence, black holes and white holes are composed of a singularity (where an immense amount of mass is condensed down to a small amount of space) and an event horizon. They are identical to one another except for their direction of passage. While black holes devour matter and let nothing escape, white holes emit huge amounts of matter and energy, allowing nothing to travel inside them. They could never be entered. If an intrepid…