Black holes can potentially divide and multiply like cells.
This scenario is unlikely but theoretically possible, new research suggests, if a black hole spins up fast enough — the maximum rate physically possible, in fact. Then the black hole “can wear pants,” funneling itself down two separate tubes of spacetime to come out as separate bodies, they report in a new study published in the journal Physical Review D.
“In our study, we investigate which physical laws normally prevent a black hole from splitting into two,” coauthor Francesco Sannino, of the University of Naples Federico II in Italy, said in a statement about the work. “We also investigate if certain circumstances may allow a split to happen.”
You’ve probably heard of black hole mergers, but a black hole split is pretty esoteric territory. Central to the work is entropy, a concept in thermodynamics that describes the degree of disorder in a system. The universe naturally tends toward disorder; it’s why things decay. Or why your house gets messier over time — unless, crucially, you introduce extra energy into the system by tidying it up .
If a black hole were to divide when it’s not rotating, it would require a decrease in entropy, or in other words, a decrease in the disorder in the system, which makes the scenario “thermodynamically unfavorable.”
That’s what pushed the researchers to explore what happens when a black hole rotates at a high speed. Intriguingly, they found a “loophole” that causes the black hole’s outer boundary, the infamous event horizon, to form a pants-like shape with two “legs” across space and time, with one resulting black hole coming out at each end.
But adding an additional constraint to this scenario, the original black hole needs to be spinning at the maximum possible speed. Any slower, and its progeny wouldn’t separate enough to prevent them from merging into one again.
“The two resulting black holes must also be able to separate rather than immediately fall back together,” Sannino said in the statement. “When we include this requirement, the window largely closes again, except possibly for black holes rotating close to their maximum possible rate.”
Though the work demonstrates it’s possible, “we cannot yet give a single probability for a black hole to split,” Sannino said. “It depends on how gravity behaves beyond Einstein’s theory, and we are working to quantify this.”
It may be possible, though, to detect a split through gamma-ray telescopes. But in case you were imagining giant cosmic monsters spawning more underlings, the researchers’ work suggests this split is more likely to happen with small black holes.
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