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Mathematicians prove Hawking wrong about the most extreme black holes
For decades, extremal black holes were considered mathematically impossible. A new proof reveals otherwise.
In 1973, the prominent physicists Stephen Hawking, John Bardeen and Brandon Carter asserted that extremal black holes can’t exist in the real world — that there is simply no plausible way that they can form. “They have nice symmetries that make it easier to calculate things,” said Gaurav Khanna of the University of Rhode Island, and this allows physicists to test theories about the mysterious relationship between quantum mechanics and gravity. The new work, contained in a pair ofrecent papers by Christoph Kehle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ryan Unger of Stanford University, demonstrates that there is nothing in our known laws of physics to prevent the formation of an extremal black hole.
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