What Is White hole?

Black holes are created when stars die catastrophically in a supernova. So what in the universe is a white hole?

It’s imagination day, and we’re going to talk about fantasy creatures. Like unicorns, but even rarer. Like leprechauns, but even more fantastical!

Today, we’re going to talk about white holes. Before we talk about white holes, let’s talk about black holes. And before we talk about Black Holes, what’s is this thing you have with holes exactly?

Black holes are places in the Universe where matter and energy are compacted so densely together that their escape velocity is greater than the speed of light. We’ve done at least a million videos on them, but if you still want more info, you can start here with our Black Hole playlist.

Fully describing a black hole requires a lot of fancy math, but these are real objects in our Universe. They were predicted by Einstein’s theory of relativity, and actually discovered over the last few decades.

Black holes are created when stars, much more massive than our Sun, die catastrophically in a supernova.
So then what’s a white hole?

White holes are created when astrophysicists mathematically explore the environment around black holes, but pretend there’s no mass within the event horizon. What happens when you have a black hole singularity with no mass?

White holes are completely theoretical mathematical concepts. In fact, if you do black hole mathematics for a living, I’m told, ignoring the mass of the singularity makes your life so much easier.

They’re not things that actually exist. It’s not like astronomers detected an unusual outburst of radiation and then developed hypothetical white hole models to explain them.

White Hole. Image Credit: universe-review.ca

As my good friend and sometimes Guide to Space contributor, Dr. Brian Koberlein says, “If you start with five cupcakes and start giving them away, you eventually run out. At that point you can’t give away any more. In this case you can’t count down past zero. Sure, you can hand out slips of paper with “I O U ONE cupcake.” written on them, but it would be ridiculous to use the existence of negative numbers to claim that “negative cupcakes” exist and can be handed out to people.”