White hole
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- For the Red Dwarf episode, see White Hole.
In astrophysics, a white hole is a postulated celestial body that is the time reversal of a black hole. While a black hole acts as a point mass that attracts and absorbs any nearby matter, a white hole acts as a point mass that repels or (perhaps) even ejects matter.
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[edit] Origin
White holes appear as part of the vacuum solution to the Einstein field equations describing a Schwarzschild wormhole. One end of this type of wormhole is a black hole, drawing in matter, and the other is a white hole, emitting matter. While this gives the impression that black holes in this universe may connect to white holes elsewhere, this turns out not to be the case for two reasons. First, Schwarzschild wormholes are unstable, disconnecting as soon as they form. Second, Schwarzschild wormholes are only a solution to the Einstein field equations in vacuum (when no matter interacts with the hole). Real black holes are formed by the collapse of stars. When the infalling stellar matter is added to a diagram of a black hole's history, it removes the part of the diagram corresponding to the white hole [1].
The existence of white holes that are not part of a wormhole is doubtful, as they appear to violate the second law of thermodynamics.
Quasars and active galactic nuclei are observed to spew out jets of matter. This is now believed to be the result of polar jets formed when matter falls into supermassive black holes at the centers of these objects. Prior to this model, white holes emitting matter were one possible explanation proposed.
[edit] Recent developments
A more current view of white holes takes into consideration a revision to the standard model of the big bang theory which states that the big bang is an explosion that happens within a black hole, with the expansion that follows the traditional interpretation of the big bang, expanding into infinite space inside the black hole. Or in other words, a miniature universe is created at the core of the black hole, which expands into extra dimensions outside of this universe. The expansion taking place in this new miniature universe, if it could be perceived from an observer from this universe, could be looked at as a white hole. Matter that could not escape the intense gravitational pull of the black hole in this universe is instead sent speeding into the newly expanding baby universe. Using that logic, one could assume that our universe itself is a white hole. Hypothetically, this model could be used to explain the increasing rate of expansion of this universe: as matter from our parent universe is engulfed by our parent black hole (the black hole that created our universe), our own universe is fed this matter which could possibly have something to do with dark matter and dark energy, which currently is thought to contribute to the increase in the rate of our universe's expansion.
