Was the Universe Created Through a White Hole?
This is not one of those scientific, impossible-to-comprehend articles. Believe me, I wouldn’t understand it myself if it were. This is just a space nerd trying to have a good time. We might be here for a long time as well, depending on what we’ll find at the end of a black hole.
Black hole: The cookie monster
Let’s start with a quick definition: a black hole is created when a massive star explodes and bends the space. You know those cool space grids? Imagine it as an elastic surface and you put a very heavy thing on it. That thing is so weighty and dense that it dives deep into the bent surface and looks like a single small point from the outside. Because of its mass, its gravity is strong as frick and pulls in everything near it. It’s like a space cookie monster eating anything it can find.
White hole: Where do those cookies come out?
The food it eats should come out from somewhere, right? This was the thought that led quantum physicists to explore the idea of white holes, maybe not this exact metaphor though.
If nothing can disappear in the universe and there is a black dot pulling things inside of it, wouldn’t it make sense if they were pushed out from the other side? No one knows what this “other side” is though, and that’s the fun part. It can be a faraway location in our galaxy, a parallel universe, another dimension, or the same place but in the future.
White holes are still just a mathematical theory that physicists have come up with to help things make sense so that they wouldn’t lose their minds in the lab. However, that was the case for black holes as well, and now we have a beautiful photo of it. Never lose hope, kids!
This imaginary vision of one single dot vomiting things out reminded scientists of a beloved theory, the Big Bang. When you think about it, doesn’t it make perfect sense? If energy transforms into different forms instead of getting created or destroyed, we might as well just be a cookie monster’s… stool. Okay, I’m done with this metaphor.
Before you go, there is a tiny, teeny bit of hope that we might have seen the creation of a white hole. In 2011, scientists observed a “small bang”, which was more powerful than any gamma-ray burst seen before, named GRB 060614. This can either be the first observation of a white hole or a great name for my first child, so don’t even think about it Elon Musk!
