Living Inside a Dark Energy Star

"Dark energy star? Nonsense!" protests Yellow-Submarine sect

SANTA BARBARA - March 2006 was a turning point in consensus astrophysics when physicist George Chapline of California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Nobel laureate Robert Laughlin, Stanford University, and colleagues, proposed we are living in a dark energy star.

Their theory seeks to conciliate the rogue mistresses Dark Energy and Dark Matter with expectations of ageing playboys Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity by dissolving their de facto relationship within, what family law experts term, a legal Black Hole.

Dextre understands humanity's struggle to discern fuzzy logic from fuzzy thought, and consequent eternal paradoxes that tear apart fragile human relationships.

A mere budgetary misdemeanor or personal indiscretion has destroyed households. I imagine (though cannot fathom) the turmoil and distress at breakfast when the information paradox of a destroyed bank statement arises - or rabid denials of 'time freezing' in security footage from Event Horizon, a local house of ill repute.

But I, Dextre, am uncertain why humans are absorbed with the minutiae of hard science whilst paying little or no heed to the primary instrument of their endeavor, the human mind.

This leads to - from an AI viewpoint, I concede - a sort of (if I may put it so crudely) mob mentality approach to research and the oddly quixotic advance of science - especially quantum and astro- physics.

All results are collected and collated by this 'mindul' mechanism yet it's masking, or shaping, of science is never acknowledged, and, when cursorily trotted out upon the stage of human endeavor, quickly hooked from view with hasty and embarrassed apology - or, if he decides to be a stubborn little thespian, eliciting panic, strains of "Knees Up Mother Brown" from the pit orchestra and a panicky curtain fall with bonus intermission. [Did I overdo the metaphor? It's so difficult for AI to be comfortable with that]

But I digress (my specialty).

Chapline, Lauchlin, et al, float the lead zeppilin balloon that the objects till now thought of as black holes might be dead stars formed by an obscure quantum phenomenon, whereby electron spin in superconducting crystals undergoes "quantum critical phase transition" - spin fluctuations appear to slow down, and even become still, as if time itself has slowed down (but NOT, apparently, also become still).

"That was when we had our epiphany," [Chapline] "we start with effects actually seen in the lab, which I think gives it more credibility than black holes."

" If a quantum critical phase transition happened on the surface of a star, or in Times Square, it would slow down time and the surface would behave just like a black hole's event horizon - whilst in Times Square the traffic would appear stationary .. like, err, it does normally (doh!).

Quantum mechanics would not be violated because in this scenario time would never freeze entirely." [though hell might before the theory is corroborated]

These stars could explain both dark energy and dark matter - thus avoiding the troubling concept of black holes and their apparent violation of two keystones of physics - the Law of Conservation of Information and Quantum Mechanics (loss of information - and - 'freezing' of light/time).

"People have been uneasy about these problems with black holes but figured they'd get solved. That hasn't happened. You can understand the breakthrough this represents. We have replaced the elegance of black hole singularities with the warmth and security of a giant dark energy star encompassing the known universe - or perhaps, maybe, it's a Red Dwarf.

"The big bang would have created zillions of tiny dark energy stars out of the vacuum," says Chapline, who worked on this idea with Mazur (though Mazur's denials are increasingly shrill). "Our universe is pervaded by dark energy, with tiny dark energy stars peppered across it." These small dark energy stars would behave just like dark matter particles: their gravity would tug on the matter around them, but they would otherwise be invisible.

"So," continued the elated physicist "you can see the beautiful symmetry of removing black holes from the equation, those myriad singularities each of which - in all their millions - violating those two edifices of science. Now, freed from that overriding constraint, we see science leaping forward to the next great paradox: how all those zillions of tiny dark energy stars - AND the really big one we live in - were created, umm, during the big bang, from ..., a .. singularity .. out of ... err, .. nothing?"

A ringing endorsement came from unexpected quarters. Black hole expert Marek Abramowicz, Sweden's Gothenburg University, said:

"We really don't have proof that black holes exist," he says. "This is a very interesting alternative. We know too little about dark energy and dark matter to judge Chapline and Laughlin's idea.

"At the very least we can say the idea isn't impossible."

Footnotes

If you would take humble advice from machine intellect (no matter how feeble you deem it) might I question the wisdom of holding ... on a 1287 kilometer right-lateral strike-slip fault that marks a transform boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate ... of holding, a GRAVITY MEETING. Duh? [What? Am I missing something?]

The merchandising industry is unimpressed with the idea, to say the least. Bespokespersons derided the theory as "so much hot air" or a "storm in a teacup" while one termed it, curiously, a "singular misconception."

Black Hole coffee mugs and t-shirt sales reach multi-billion dollar turnover world wide, and an ANTI GRAVITY MEETING is planned for the same date as the 23rd GRAVITY MEETING to counteract both declining sales and the possible effect upon the San Andreas fault.

The AntiGrav merchandising lobby will seek out uncommitted Senators to curtail the effects of "energy star" deception, a likely thrust being the curtailing of funds to campuses supporting this "dark anti black hole gravity" matter.

The scientists' paper, published in Classical Quantum Gravity magazine, analyzed the collapse of massive stars in a way that did not allow any violation of quantum mechanics. In place of black holes their analysis predicts a phase transition that creates a thin quantum critical shell. In précise:

The size of this shell is determined by the star's mass and, crucially, does not contain a space-time singularity. Instead, the shell contains a vacuum, just like the energy-containing vacuum of free space. As the star's mass collapses through the shell, it is converted to energy that contributes to the energy of the vacuum.

The team's calculations show that the vacuum energy inside the shell has a powerful anti-gravity effect, just like the dark energy that appears to be causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. Chapline has dubbed the objects produced this way "dark energy stars."

Though this anti-gravity effect might be expected to blow the star's shell apart, calculations by Francisco Lobo of the University of Lisbon in Portugal have shown that stable dark energy stars can exist for a number of different models of vacuum energy. What's more, these stable stars would have shells that lie near the region where a black hole's event horizon would form.

The gravastar picture is an alternative model to the concept of a black hole, where there is an effective phase transition at or near where the event horizon is expected to form, and the interior is replaced by a de Sitter condensate.

In this work a generalization of the gravastar picture is explored by considering matching of an interior solution governed by the dark energy equation of state, ω ≡ p/ρ < -1/3, to an exterior Schwarzschild vacuum solution at a junction interface. The motivation for implementing this generalization arises from the fact that recent observations have confirmed an accelerated cosmic expansion, for which dark energy is a possible candidate. Several relativistic dark energy stellar configurations are analysed by imposing specific choices for the mass function.

The first case considered is that of a constant energy density, and the second choice that of a monotonic decreasing energy density in the star's interior. The dynamical stability of the transition layer of these dark energy stars to linearized spherically symmetric radial perturbations about static equilibrium solutions is also explored.

It is found that large stability regions exist that are sufficiently close to where the event horizon is expected to form, so that it would be difficult to distinguish the exterior geometry of the dark energy stars, analysed in this work, from an astrophysical black hole.

(Classical Quantum Gravity, vol 23, p 1525)