Expert: Tom Whiting - 5/12/2004

Question
Hi, my name is Henry Wakley. I am currently a senior in the Miller School in Albemarle County, Virginia. Within the last month we have been assigned to do a project within a branch of modern physics. The topic I chose for my project was Black Holes, White Holes, and Worm Holes. A fairly broad topic but i'm just doing some basic research on he three. I have a few questions about my topics and any help would be appreciated.

1) What kinds of uses would physicists want to use black holes and white holes for if they exist?

2) If white holes reflect light completely, wouldn't they just look like a star? How could we tell a difference?

3) How could we use a black hole as an energy source?

Once again..any help you all may have to offer would be appreciated. Thanks a bunch.

Henry

Answer
Hi Henry...
Well, for starters, looks like you are working with old
material there....in astronomy, any reference older than
3 years is probably out of date.  It's currently a very
fast evolving topic.

Some background here...before we knew what so-called white
holes (quasars) were, a fancy science fiction writer came up with the term, and idea of,  'worm hole' to 'connect' black holes to white holes.
Turns out that white holes (QSO's-  Quasi-stellar Objects) weren't what the science fiction writers thought, but simply the cores of quasars which, in turn, turned out to be the cores of very distant early, very energetic galaxies out there billions of light-years. An explanation of their high
energetic output was thus found.....thus the sci-fi idea of
an imaginary, pure  'white hole' quickly evaporated, and
along with it, the term "worm hole" acting as a "connector".

But, for your report....the only thing left that really exists are black holes which do, in fact, exist, AND
come in several varieties.  There are the multi-million
solar mass black holes residing in the centers of many
galaxies...in fact, perhaps all galaxies.  These, of course
have not been imaged visually because of their small size
relative to an entire galaxy, but a large amount of circumstantial evidence indicates that they do, in fact,
exist....mainly in the form of rapidly revolving stars
around the cores of galaxies that show a huge central mass
in the center...otherwise, the stars would have long since flown out of the central region as they are revolving so fast.  (Their red shift and blue shifted spectrum shows that high velocity).

The other common variety of black hole is the small 3-10 solar mass black hole which forms when a massive star goes supernova, and the core of same collapses past the neutron star stage, and down to a relatively small black hole.

Up until very recently, the medium size black hole has been
a mystery, but recent evidence indicates that they, although
rare, exist also, mainly in the cores of globular star
clusters like Messier 15 and M-13. But this is relatively
new research...perhaps the internet can help on this subject.

As far as uses, even the closest black hole, star
SS433 Cygni at about 5000 lightyears is kind of out of
range, but if it were relatively nearby, we could use
a black hole for an ultimate place for our garbage, and
we could extract energy from it's rotation, although that would require a lot of work.

Also, if one came across a rapidly rotating black hole,
one could actually use the two event horizons for time
travel forward (but not backward as time is a one-way
arrow...always forward, never backward).
Of course, all this pre-supposes that one can get fairly
close to a black hole....in reality, black holes and their
immediate regions are big X-ray emitters if there is
any kind of an accretion disk spiraling around same, which is heated to millions of degrees temperature...in fact, humans and ANY organic life would not want to get within several billion miles of a black hole due to the hard X-ray
production...most are very deadly.  And these are hard
X-rays, not the soft X-rays the dentist or surgeon uses
on the human body here on Earth.  Personally, I would not
want to be anywhere near a black hole with an accretion
disk of material.

3.  We could use the rotational motion and high mass of a black hole to accelerate masses, increasing the bodies kinetic energy, without of course falling thru the event horizon...and thereby extract kinetic energy from the black hole.

Hope all this helps;
Clear Skies,
Tom Whiting
Erie, PA

PS...recently the term 'worm hole' had been re-invented
to explain connecting parts of quantum mechanics....the
sub-sub-sub atomic world of smaller than 10 to the -43rd
power centimeter....but that is different than the
macro-world of which we live, so we could never take
advantage of the quantum mechanics laws, and world, and
its so-called 'worm holes'.  I believe the new
'string theory' of quantum mechanics makes some use of
kind of worm holes.  But that's off the subject.