Black Holes Don't Exist?

This article from Nature puts forward a very controversial theory. George Chapline, a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Labs, has concluded that black holes, at least as originally pictured by Einstein's theory of relativity, don't really exist. The objects we are detecting, he says, are actually stars composed of "dark energy."

If the dark-energy star is big enough, Chapline predicts, any electrons bounced out will have been converted to positrons, which then annihilate other electrons in a burst of high-energy radiation. Chapline says that this could explain the radiation observed from the centre of our galaxy, previously interpreted as the signature of a huge black hole.

He also thinks that the Universe could be filled with 'primordial' dark-energy stars. These are formed not by stellar collapse but by fluctuations of space-time itself, like blobs of liquid condensing spontaneously out of a cooling gas. These, he suggests, could be stuff that has the same gravitational effect as normal matter, but cannot be seen: the elusive substance known as dark matter.

Scientists have been scrambling for a while to explain why the universe seems to be expanding at increasing speeds, rather than slowing down. There has also been a lot of work done trying to determine the total mass of the universe, and the numbers keep coming up short. This has led to speculation about "dark matter" which we can't see, and which would account for the missing matter. This new theory could be the next phase in trying to explain the dark matter.