Five-dimensional black holes can destroy the general theory of relativity

A simulation on the COSMOS supercomputer, carried out by theoretical physicists from Cambridge and Queen Mary University of London, showed that black holes that form in the Universe, which has more than four dimensions, should break up into bare singularities. True, only black holes of a special shape will be exposed to this property.

A bare singularity is a point of infinite density, near which the general theory of relativity becomes untenable, that is, loses its predictive ability.
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The English physicist Roger Penrose formulated the " principle of cosmic censorship, " which states that "nature abhors a bare singularity." Subsequently, physicists expressed other hypotheses: Stephen Hawking clarified that singularities, if they can exist, must be hidden from the observer, for example, by the horizon of a black hole. This principle was called the “weak form of cosmic censorship.”

In our four-dimensional space-time, black holes have a spherical shape (and also, perhaps, objects can form in the form of a ring with zero thickness, but non-zero radius, called “ ring-shaped singularity ” or “Kerr singularity”).

Since no statements are made in GR about the number of existing dimensions, physicists periodically subject theory to tests in spaces with a large number of dimensions, for example, to verify the existence of space censorship in them. In 2002, the physicists Emparan and Real calculated that in a space with more than four dimensions there may be non-spherical black holes — for example, black rings.



The study of the behavior of such rings and engaged British theoreticians . Simulation on a supercomputer showed that these rings are unstable. Most often they collapse into an ordinary spherical black hole, but very thin rings can turn into beads, where the thickenings are separated by more and more thin strings. This whole structure eventually decays and leads to the formation of bare singularities.

“As long as the singularity hides behind the horizon of events, it does not bother anyone, and GR is holding on. The principle of cosmic censorship says that this is always the case, explains the co-author of [Markus Kunesch], a student from Cambridge. - While the principle is true, we successfully predict the future near black holes. After all, physics, in fact, is trying to predict the future on the basis of existing knowledge about the current state of the Universe. ”

“The existence of bare singularities breaks all GRT,” explains the co-author, Saran Tanyasavanekul [Saran Tunyasuvunakool], another student. - And if GTO breaks, everything gets upside down, because it loses its predictive ability. And then it cannot be used as an independent theory explaining the Universe. ”

The COSMOS supercomputer is based in Cambridge and has a computing power of 38.6 TFLOPS, and is based on SGI UV2000 systems with 1856 Intel Xeon E5-2600 cores, 14.8 TB RAM and the 31st Intel® Xeon PhiTM co-processor.