Stars Within Stars: New Theory Suggests Black Holes Were Merely Nestars Stacked Like Russian Tea Dolls

For more than a century, black holes have captivated and intrigued scientists. These cosmic voids pose serious puzzles for astronomers as they fathom how anything that ventures into them vanishes forever.

Although there is theoretical and observational evidence to prove the existence of these regions, the theory of black holes is not without issue. First, general relativity predicts that the mass of a star compresses to an infinitely dense singularity, which breaks the laws of physics. Second, the singularity is shrouded by an event horizon which serves as a point of no return for anything devoured by the black hole. Both are problematic since some mechanisms prevent singularities and event horizons from forming.

Understanding the Interior of Black Holes

In 1916, German physicist Karl Schwardschild gave the first exact solution of Einstein's general gravitational equations. This has led to a description of the nature of space in the neighborhood of a mass point.

Schwardschild's solution suggests that the center of a black hole consists of a singularity, a region where space and time do not exist anymore. At this point, all physical laws, including the general theory of relativity, no longer apply. As a result, the principle of causality is also suspended.

This brings a great nuisance for the scientific community since it indicates that no information can escape from a black hole beyond the event horizon. Because of this, Schwardschild's solution did not receive much attention outside the theoretical realm for a long time.

In 1971, the first candidate for a black hole was discovered. This was followed by discovering the black hole in the center of the Milky Way galaxy in the 2000s. Finally, in 2019, the very first image of a black hole was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration.

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Nested Celestial Bodies

A new theoretical idea emerged from general relativity in 2001. Pawel Mazur and Emil Mottola introduced the concept of "gravastars," or compact bodies with dark energy cores, as an alternative to black holes. These celestial objects would have a solid surface and an exotic energy that repels all matter, avoiding the trap of black holes.

Dark energy is believed to be the force that accelerates the universe's expansion. In gravastars, dark energy is believed to exert a negative pressure to protect the stars from their inward gravitational forces.

A new solution was recently developed to understand the heart of Albert Einstein's most revolutionary theory. It suggests that hypothetical stars called "nestars" can be formed when gravastars are stacked like Russian tea dolls or matryoshka dolls.

In the paper "Nested solutions of gravitational condensate stars," theoretical physicists Daniel Jampolski and Professor Luciano Rezzolla of Goethe University Frankfurt propose the existence of a gravastar inside another gravastar. Their solution to the field equations allows for an entire series of nested gravastars.

While Mazur and Motola reasoned that the gravastar has a near-infinite thin skin composed of normal matter, the matter-composed shell of the nectar is somewhat thicker. Since each gravastar behaves as a recognizable self-gravitating equilibrium, a large space of parameters exists for constructing nested gravastars.

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