| Black Hole Saturns |
| Tuesday, 13 February 2007 | |
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Black hole Saturns—that is, regular, spherical black holes with rings made of black hole-like material—could exist, physicists say in a new study. What's cooler than that? Well, something that's real. The idea that black saturns might exist is based on the conjecture that space has more dimensions than the three we know and love—and that, in itself is a big leap. The main motivation today behind speculating that space has extra dimensions is string theory, the physics theory that has become enormously popular but so far has no experimental evidence supporting it (or denying it). It's not even a true theory, some critics have said, but just a collection of not-totally formulated ideas, as Lee Smolin argued in his book The Trouble with Physics. I enjoyed that book, and it also made me reluctant to write about stuff like black saturns, despite how cool they sound. So when I saw this paper a couple weeks ago, I thought for a second about writing about it and then decided not to. But at least one other journalist did, and it's still fun to read about this stuff, so check it out New Scientist's website. |