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Black Holes
First, let me state that I have found that many people are confused as to what a “black-hole” is meant to be and why it is called a “black-hole”. We need to clear that up to begin before we can proceed further. You may or may not be aware of the fact that a rocket taking off from earth has to attain a velocity of 25,000 miles per hour (or 7 miles per second) to totally escape from earth’s gravitational pull. This is called the escape velocity of the earth. The planet Jupiter, being more massive than earth, has a much higher escape velocity, 37.5 miles per second or 135,000 miles per hour. The Sun is much more massive again and has an escape velocity of 386 miles per second or 1.3 million miles per hour. In contrast to these figures, a black-hole must be so massive that its escape velocity is greater than the speed of light at 186,000 miles per second or 670 million miles per hour. This is taken to mean that even light cannot escape from a black-hole as its speed is not high enough, and it is for that reason that it is a “black” hole. This enormous gravitational field is expected to suck distant objects in and so keep the mass of the hole building. This approach leads to one of the reasons why I personally have doubts about the identity of what they are seeing. They may not be ‘black-holes’ but something else instead. There is strong evidence for a faster speed of light in the past, due to the initially low Zero Point Energy in space. (It is the ZPE which produces the virtual particles which slow light photons in their path; thus as the ZPE built with time due to universal expansion, light speed slowed due to increasing numbers of virtual particles.) If the speed of light was higher in the past, and if a black hole does not let light escape, then black holes in the past would have had to have been much more massive than black holes today, or light would escape them. If light were escaping, they would not be black holes, by definition. If this reasoning is followed through, then, on the ZPE model, black-holes as such are unlikely to occur in the early universe. They could only develop as the ZPE built up and the speed of light slowed down. When we take a look at these object, there is a consistency in the descriptions, whether they be star-sized, or supermassive with masses more than a million times that of our sun. What is noted in many instances of “super-massive black holes” in galactic centers is a rapidly rotating accretion disk around a central object. It is generally accepted that the disk appears to be emitting X-rays because of its rapid rotation. It is often assumed that this disk of material is spiraling down into the black hole. Another common feature of the presumed black holes are the jets that shoot out from their poles. These tightly constrained jets of material are emitted at high velocity. These jets are also noted in the case of some smaller, stellar-sized “black-holes”. For example, the Crab pulsar in M 1 in Taurus has had the torus of material and spinning disk as well as the polar jets which have been photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope. (There is a debate as to whether the Crab pulsar is a neutron star or a black hole, but what has been observed fits the description of a small black hole.) The jets present a problem for the black hole theory. Despite extensive computer modeling, it has proved very difficult to get the polar jets to emerge from a ‘black-hole’. Black-holes are meant to suck material in, not spew them out in tightly collimated jets. It has been assumed that it might be possible for the spinning disk to expel the jets due to twisted magnetic fields, since strong magnetic fields appear to be focusing the jets. Nevertheless, the modeling has not been encouraging on this, and the problem is commonly dismissed by simply invoking the unspecified action of magnetic fields. An even bigger problem is noted near the location of the supposed black-hole at the center of our galaxy, namely Sagittarius A* (pronounced “A star” and usually written Sag A*). There are at least 28 stars in tight orbit around Sag A*. The orbiting rate of these stars can be used to calculate the mass of the central object and it is around 3 million solar masses based on these orbit figures. However, if Sag A* really was a “black-hole”, Einstein’s equations indicate that gravitational lensing should occur there due to the extremely strong gravitational field. We ought to be able to see these orbiting stars being lensed in that environment. Astronomers have searched and watched for over 20 years and even the closest stars to the object have never been gravitationally lensed. In addition, a cloud of gas and dust was in an orbit that was carrying it close to the central object and it was expected to be torn apart by the gravitational field of the ‘black-hole’. Instead, the cloud passed by the central object in Sag A* virtually unscathed. Some innovative explanations had to follow the negated prediction. But this embarrassment, coupled with the other observations, serves to emphasize that the central object in our galaxy may not be a ‘black-hole’ after all. Given these problems, what is the alternative to a black hole? The only viable alternative comes from plasma physics. In that discipline of science, spinning disks and polar jets are an everyday occurrence with objects like plasmoids. Plasmoids occur at the focus of electric currents and magnetic fields. These spherical entities are made up of charged particles circling and accelerating under the influence of the strong electric and magnetic fields and are constrained by them. These fields accelerate the charged particles to enormous velocities which increases their masses significantly, as well as the overall mass of the plasmoid. When the plasmoid is in “quiet” mode, it is charging up and storing electromagnetic energy from the galaxy circuit in which it is involved. Once a threshold is reached (as is the case for a capacitor), the energy is discharged as radiation and tightly focused polar jets. A beam of electrons emerges from one pole of the plasmoid, while a beam of ions or protons comes from the opposite pole. Such charged particle beams are inevitably constrained by strong circling magnetic fields. The equatorial disks of material or plasma are similarly under the influence of electric and magnetic forces. Observation reveals that the center of our galaxy (and other galaxies) is the focus of such electric and magnetic fields. Any entire galaxy comprises a giant electric circuit, with current entering through the spiral arms and exiting through the central jets.
Plasma physics, in line with laboratory experiments, expects a large plasmoid to occur at the center of a galaxy. Smaller plasmoids would be expected where supernova remnants exist, as that environment also has a concentration of strong electric and magnetic fields from the disrupted star and the fields local to that part of the galaxy. Mathematically, the equation for a star orbiting around a central plasmoid must take into consideration the electric and magnetic effects as well as gravity. Dr, Anthony Peratt of LANL has done this, and his equation has the potential to satisfy the orbital characteristics of the stars around Sag A* without the necessity for a black-hole. There is an additional factor brought into the plasma approach by the Zero Point Energy (ZPE). The strength of the ZPE controls the electric and magnetic properties of the vacuum. When the ZPE strength was low, electric and magnetic interactions occurred more quickly, voltages were intrinsically higher and currents intrinsically stronger. Thus, in the early universe, plasmoid behavior would have been significantly enhanced. As we look far out into space, we see the centers of galaxies as very, very bright objects. These are called quasars. The farther out we look, the brighter they are. Keep in mind that the farther out we look the further back in time we are also looking. This means that at their earliest stages, these quasars, these galaxies centers, were extraordinarily brilliant, outshining the rest of the galaxy that surrounded them. Quasars which are the centers of galaxies and are usually assumed to be powered by super-massive black holes. These very distant, ultra-brilliant quasars have extremely active jets. On the gravitational model for black-holes, this presents a problem. They can only behave this way and be that brilliant if copious quantities of matter are falling into the black-hole powering the central quasar. In order to account for that much matter falling into the presumed black hole, it is suggested that galaxies were colliding and gas and dust from a great number of supernova explosions was being sucked in. There are a good number of other postulated explanations, but none of them are consistently satisfactory. As we come closer to our own time and galaxy, observed quasar activity gradually dies down until, in our own galaxy, Sag A* only emits occasional X-rays and gamma rays. If quasars are powered by plasmoids and plasma physics processes rather than black-holes and gravitational processes, this tapering off from their initial activity is fully explicable. As the universe expanded and became older, the ZPE strength built up and electric and magnetic processes tapered down. This is what we see happening out in space; the closer we come to our own galaxy, the more quiet the quasar remnants become. So the ZPE-Plasma Model accounts for the observational data in a way that does not involve extreme gravitational phenomena. Electric and magnetic phenomena in space can be up to 1039 times stronger than gravity. So it is no surprise that the intense power output of quasars at the frontiers of the universe can be accounted for much more readily by plasma mechanisms than gravitational ones. We are looking far back into time when the Zero Point Energy was low and the magnetic and electric properties were higher, as were the voltages. It would be expected that these plasmoids would be incredibly brilliant under those circumstances. In the gravitation model, it is assumed that stellar-sized black-holes are formed in supernova explosions. In this model, the outer layers of a star collapse extremely rapidly putting immense pressures on the stellar core. These pressures and heat convert the core into either a neutron star or a black-hole, depending on the original mass of the star. The surface material of the star is then blown off in the resulting explosion and the debris goes to join the interstellar clouds of gas, dust and plasma. Plasma physics explains a supernova as a stellar explosion as well. This explosion then forms a plasmoid and not a black hole. Gas and dust are blown off, which is easily seen. In both cases, it is expected that the core of the star remains in its approximate original position. Its final position would depend on the mass of ejected material and whether or not the explosion was asymmetrical The gravitational model states that even if black holes stay in their original orbit, their extremely strong gravitational attraction will pull relatively nearby objects from their own orbits. This strong pull will then cause them to approach the black-hole and eventually be consumed by it. Observed flare-ups of these objects are attributed to the sucking in of material. If, however, these objects are small plasmoids, they would not be sucking anything in. Instead, they remain relatively quiet while they are ‘charging up’ from their galaxy’s electric current. The flaring would be seen when there was a discharge of the built-up energy. The final question had to do with the size of the proposed singularity at the center of a black hole. A ‘singularity’ is an extraordinarily compacted bit of matter that is extremely dense. No one has ever been into a black-hole and reported this! There is a huge amount of theory involved with minimal data to back it up. What is being stated from theory is that as you approach the center of a black-hole, the matter is expected to become increasingly dense and hence more and more compressed. At its most dense and compressed it is proposed that there will be a point called the singularity. The smallest size that can exist in our present universe is what is called the “Planck length”. This length is determined by certain equations as being about 10-33 centimeters (or 10-35 meters). In a similar way, the maximum density that any object can achieve in this present universe is about 5 x 1093 grams per cubic centimeter. The known laws of physics are not valid beyond those limits. These limits may theoretically be reached in the singularity of a black-hole (if they actually exist) but we have no way of knowing for sure. It is really scientific speculation. Barry Setterfield, February, 2016
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