A new study reveals that black holes stop obeying one of their fundamental laws
Previously, it was thought black holes could not be deformed by anything outside them. But it appears they do alter their shape under certain conditions.
Black holes have long carried a reputation as the universe’s ultimate rule-breakers. Time and again, they force scientists to rethink what they thought they knew about these mysterious objects. And now they’ve done it again. A recent study published in the science journal Physical Review D challenges one of the oldest and most deeply entrenched assumptions about how black holes respond to external forces.
What is the “Love number”?
To understand what’s happened, it helps to look at how objects deform in space. Back in 1909, mathematician A.E.H. Love developed a way to measure how a planet or star stretches when another object’s gravity pulls on it - exactly the same process that allows the Moon to raise tides on Earth. That measurement became known as the “Love number”, named after its creator.
Almost everything in the universe - Earth, ordinary stars, and even neutron stars - has a Love number greater than zero because every object yields, at least slightly, to the gravitational pull of its neighbors. For decades, however, scientists believed that black holes were different. Their Love number was thought to be exactly zero. Not a tiny amount. Zero. The prevailing view held that black holes simply could not be stretched or deformed by anything outside them.
The exception that changes the rules
What this new study shows is that researchers have been looking at the problem from only one perspective. Until now, the idea that black holes are completely immune to deformation - that seemingly absolute zero - was based on measuring their response to traditional forces such as gravity and electromagnetism. Under those influences, a black hole appears entirely unaffected.
The story changes dramatically, however, when scientists consider a different class of microscopic forces, those associated with quantum particles such as neutrinos. When the calculations were revisited from this new angle, researchers encountered a major surprise: the response was no longer zero. At the subatomic level, black holes can in fact be affected and deformed.
Why does this discovery matter?
In short, it suggests that black holes are not the perfectly simple, featureless objects they were once believed to be. By showing that they can respond to certain quantum particles, the researchers propose that black holes may be cloaked in a form of “quantum hair”.
For the first time, scientists may have a tangible clue that could help them probe what lies inside these enigmatic objects - one of the deepest and most enduring mysteries in the universe.
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