There’s still a whole lot we don’t know about black holes and that goes double for the supermassive variety. They can be billions of times the mass of our Sun and many were created when the universe was in its infancy, meaning there weren’t any stars big enough to collapse into such large behemoths. Now, physicists have a new theory about what they are and it could change everything.
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00:00 There's still a lot we don't know about black holes, and that goes double for the
00:06 supermassive variety.
00:08 They can be billions of times the mass of our sun, and many were created when the universe
00:12 was in its infancy, meaning there weren't any stars big enough to collapse into such
00:16 large behemoths.
00:17 A big problem with black holes is that physics as we know it sort of breaks down when applied
00:21 to their mysterious workings.
00:23 However, a new take on an old equation might just help us better understand how black holes
00:28 work.
00:29 When stars break down because of enough mass is in a small enough area, gravity will squish
00:33 it down into an even smaller area.
00:35 But what happens after that?
00:36 Well, we don't really have the math to back it up.
00:38 A hypothesis to explain it was incepted back in 2001, where physicists suggested a gravitational
00:44 condensate star, or gravastar, could occur.
00:47 It's a hypothetical cosmic object consisting of a thin layer of matter compressed to extreme
00:51 thinness and inflated with dark energy, which is also still technically hypothetical.
00:57 Stars would essentially appear to us as black holes, all while circumventing paradoxes in
01:01 physics.
01:02 That's because the new theory suggests there could be another gravastar inside that one,
01:06 effectively creating what they liken to Russian dolls of intensely dense gravastars.
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