Is there a Black Hole inside our Sun?

There’s a hole inside our Sun. A mass equivalent to 1,500 Earths has disappeared. Tracking this over time could change the way we see stars.

There’s a hole inside our Sun. Right in the middle. A mass the size of 1,500 Earths has simply disappeared. Much of what we know about the Sun’s behavior says it should be there – but when we interpret the data encoded in the Sun’s light, that mass is nowhere to be seen.

Analysis of the transmission of sound and light from the Sun’s surface using a new three-dimensional model, as opposed to the usual 2D models, suggests that the Sun has a much different chemical composition than previously assumed.

Namely, there appear to be significantly fewer heavy elements (heavier than hydrogen and helium, what astronomers call metals) than were estimated using outdated models that make calculations based on a completely flat surface of the Sun, which is not an accurate representation.

The missing metals inside our Sun suggest that there is a large mass, several billion megatons, of material that has not yet been identified.

One possibility that has been suggested is that the Sun’s core may be made up of a significant amount of so-called dark matter – a source of mass that exerts gravitational force but does not interact in the same way as ordinary matter.

It is often assumed that the surface of a structure can be adequately represented as a two-dimensional area, completely flat and devoid of any depth.

However, in reality, two-dimensional surfaces do not exist. If magnified sufficiently, even the most apparently flat surface has a three-dimensional structure. This can pose a problem when physics that was formulated using two dimensions is reexamined using a more realistic 3D model.

Inside our Sun – A New Perspective

One such situation arose when astronomer Martin Asplund abandoned the usual 2D model of the Sun’s surface and instead used a supercomputer to model it as a three-dimensional surface. Asplund hopes to formulate a more accurate model for analyzing spectral and seismological data to better understand the Sun’s interior.

Since the interior cannot be observed directly, the sound and light emissions emanating from the Sun’s surface are a window into the interior. Asplund’s new model has yielded a fascinating and controversial revelation, with seismological and spectrophotometric data indicating that the Sun has significantly fewer heavy elements than previously calculated (using the 2D model).

Because light and sound pass through heavy elements differently than they do through light elements such as hydrogen and helium, Asplund’s updated calculations suggested a vastly different chemical composition for the Sun.

The absence of heavy elements represents several billion megatons of missing matter (the equivalent of about 1,500 Earths).

The solution to the apparent enigma is to say that there is a form of matter inside our Sun – about 1027 kilograms – that does not behave like ordinary states of matter.

Perhaps under the extreme temperatures and pressures of the inner region the matter takes on different quantum properties and has altered opacity or acoustic resonances.

Confirmation or denial

Jim Bailey, of Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, seems to confirm that this is indeed possible when he used the Z Pulsed Power Facility, or Z machine, to expose matter to temperatures and pressures equivalent to those found in certain locations inside our Sun.

Another possible explanation is that some form of dark matter resides at the center of the Sun, representing mass but interacting weakly with the propagating phonon and photon emissions. The exact nature of dark matter, however, remains a mystery.

Several proposals have been floated: from new sources of matter, such as weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPS), axions, to primordial black holes and superfluid dynamics of the space-time dimension.

Further analysis and the evolution of supercomputers may begin to reveal what lies inside our Sun, but for now all that is certain is that the conventional model does not provide explanations that match observations.

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Source: newscientist.com, resonancescience.org.

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