If you squeeze enough stuff into one place, space-time itself will contract in a sweet cosmic kiss known as a black hole.
As far as Einstein’s sums go, that “stuff” includes the massless glow of electromagnetic radiation. Given E = mc2which describes the equivalence between mass and energy, the energy of light itself should – in theory – be able to create a black hole if enough of it is concentrated in one place.
Before you get out the big lasers and start punching holes in the floorboards of the universe, there’s one thing researchers from the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain and the University of Waterloo in Canada want you to know.
Something called the Schwinger effect can make the whole thing impossible before you’ve even started.
Einstein’s general theory of relativity is a description of space and time distorting in relation to the presence of energy, such as that in a mass. Place enough mass in one place and the distortion will become so extreme that nothing – not even light – will escape.
In the mid-1950s, American theoretical physicist John Wheeler discovered that there was nothing in Einstein’s theory that ruled out the possibility that the energy within a sufficient concentration of gravitational or electromagnetic waves could warp space-time enough to cause those same waves to move at their to hold place. .
He called this exotic object a geon and considered it a kind of hypothetical, highly unstable particle.
Today, geons are a relic from an era of scientific musings that also gave us wormholes and white holes; theoretical toys that tell us more about the limits of mathematical models than about physical reality.
Yet a form of geon that Wheeler called a “kugelblitz” occasionally turns up in science fiction as a fantastic source of power. German for ‘ball lightning’, it was proposed that these tiny black holes the size of a proton would form in the intense focus of incredibly energetic beams of light, like a futuristic high-powered laser.
While general relativity gives the green light to Kugelblitze, quantum physics has its doubts. That’s why theoretical physicist Álvaro Álvarez-Domínguez from the Complutense University of Madrid and his team have collected figures on the behavior of electromagnetic fields as their energy rises to extreme levels.
The quantum landscape is like a casino where waves of possibilities continuously undulate like non-stop roulette wheels. Small bets rarely pay off, but if you pile enough money on a table you are almost guaranteed a win.
Likewise, a strong electromagnetic field in otherwise empty space almost guarantees that pairs of electrons and positrons will emerge from the quantum flow of endless possibilities.
In a paper yet to be peer-reviewed, Álvarez-Domínguez and his team showed that this phenomenon, known as the Schwinger effect, would prevent the formation of Kugelblitze, ranging in size from almost twice the size of Jupiter to a fraction the size of Jupiter. a proton.
In fact, piling all that light in one place would provide the necessary energy for pairs of charged particles to form and fly away at the speed of light, preventing the growing hole in space-time from ever becoming a black hole will develop. defining the event horizon.
“Our analysis strongly suggests that the formation of black holes solely by electromagnetic radiation is impossible, either by concentrating light in a hypothetical laboratory environment or by naturally occurring astrophysical phenomena,” the team wrote in their analysis.
That doesn’t completely rule out the possibility. The researchers admit that things could have been different in the “exceptionally extreme conditions” of the early universe.
Other forms of geon, such as those based on gravitational waves, remain a curiosity that could have existed in the nascent cosmos billions of years ago.
Those now relying on a Kugelblitz-powered spacecraft to fly them to the stars may have to go back to the drawing board.
This article is available on the preprint server arXiv.