We Don't Need No Stinkin' Black Holes V

Following a suggestion of Lubos in the comments to the immediately preceding post, here is the link to New Scientist story on Chapline's idea. They present it quite nicely, I think. A key idea is that what we think of as black holes might really be "dark energy stars."
...[Chapline] and Laughlin realised that if a quantum critical phase transition happened on the surface of a star, it would slow down time and the surface would behave just like a black hole's event horizon. Quantum mechanics would not be violated because in this scenario time would never freeze entirely. "We start with effects actually seen in the lab, which I think gives it more credibility than black holes," says Chapline.

With this idea in mind, they - along with Emil Mottola at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Pawel Mazur of the University of South Carolina in Columbia and colleagues - analysed the collapse of massive stars in a way that did not allow any violation of quantum mechanics. Sure enough, in place of black holes their analysis predicts a phase transition that creates a thin quantum critical shell. The size of this shell is determined by the star's mass and, crucially, does not contain a space-time singularity. Instead, the shell contains a vacuum, just like the energy-containing vacuum of free space. As the star's mass collapses through the shell, it is converted to energy that contributes to the energy of the vacuum.

The team's calculations show that the vacuum energy inside the shell has a powerful anti-gravity effect, just like the dark energy that appears to be causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. Chapline has dubbed the objects produced this way "dark energy stars".


A considerably earlier, string theory inspired paper:
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9705100

by Kenji Hotta contains some related ideas. It was one of the first that caused me to get interested in the WDNNSBH theory. His abstract:
In recent years, Susskind, Thorlacius and Uglum have proposed a model for strings near a black hole horizon in order to represent the quantum mechanical entropy of the black hole and to resolve the information loss problem. However, this model is insufficient because they did not consider the metric modification due to massive strings and did not explain how to carry information from inside of the horizon to the outside world. In this paper, we present a possible, intuitive model for the time development of a black hole in order to solve the information loss problem. In this model, we assume that a first order phase transition occurs near the Hagedorn temperature and the string gas changes to hypothetical matter with vanishing entropy and energy which we call `the Planck solid'. We also study the background geometry of black holes in this picture and find out that there is no singularity within the model.
To me, at least, Hotta's "Planck solid" looks a bit like Chapline's "dark energy star."

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