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

A simulation on the COSMOS supercomputer, conducted by theoretical physicists from Cambridge and Queen Mary of London University, showed that black holes forming in a universe with more than four dimensions should decay into bare singularities. True, only black holes of a special shape will be affected by this property.

The naked singularity is a point of infinite density, near which the general theory of relativity becomes insolvent, that is, it loses its predictive ability.

English physicist Roger Penrose formulated the " principle of space censorship"which states that" nature abhors a naked singularity. "Later, physicists expressed other hypotheses: Stephen Hawking clarified that singularities, if they exist, should certainly be hidden from the observer - for example, the black hole horizon. This principle was called “A weak form of cosmic censorship.”

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

Since GTR does not make any statements about the number of existing measurements, physicists periodically subject the theory to checks in spaces with a large number of dimensions in order to, for example, verify the existence of cosmic censorship in them. In 2002, physicists Emparan and Real calculated that in a space with more than four dimensions nonspherical black holes can exist - for example, black rings.



The study of the behavior of such rings was done by British theorists.. 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 a kind of beads, where thickenings are separated by more and more thin strings. This whole structure eventually decays and leads to the formation of bare singularities.

“While the singularity is hiding behind the horizon of events, it does not bother anyone and general relativity holds on. The principle of space censorship suggests that this always happens, ”explains a co-author of [Markus Kunesch], a student from Cambridge. - As long as 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 down the whole GTR,” explains co-author of the work, Saran Tunyasuvunakool, another student. - And if the GRT breaks down, everything rises upside down, because she has lost predictive ability. And then it can no longer be used as an independent theory explaining the universe. ”

The COSMOS supercomputer is located in Cambridge and has a processing 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 coprocessor.