• Question: Are black holes and white holes connected, if yes, how?

    Asked by anon-267549 on 10 Nov 2020.
    • Photo: Liza Sazonova

      Liza Sazonova answered on 10 Nov 2020:

      White holes are an /extremely/ theoretical thing, we really don’t know if they can exist, or how they would exist. It’s a cool thing to think about sometimes, but we’re very far away from actually studying them in the real world (if they even exist). On the other hand, black holes are very very real and we even took a picture of one recently! https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/news/black-hole-image-makes-history
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      The idea for a white hole came from the idea for a black hole in 1960s. It was a consequence of a certain type of a black hole: if one exist, so must the other. It wasn’t something we saw, just something we knew from equations. We now know that type of black hole doesn’t exist, but there are other types of black holes. Other types of white holes also /might/ exist, but we’ve never seen one.
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      If these weird things do exist, they will certainly be linked to the black holes: they could be, for example, the “other side” of one – but speculating about these things is more science fiction at this point than science. Still fun though 🙂

    • Photo: Daisy Shearer

      Daisy Shearer answered on 11 Nov 2020:

      White holes are something that we haven’t seen any evidence of (yet), but they have been theorised from general relativity. From my understanding, they’re the opposite of a black hole. Black holes suck everything inside them whereas white holes push everything away.

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