Black Holes or Burning Disks
And how did those black holes form in the first place? Have not centrifugal and pressure forces always exceeded the self attraction of central galactic-mass accumulations? Why have the masses of the observed central BHs decreased during cosmic epochs, from initial <= 10^9.5 M to their present-day <= 10^7M, as shown by the statistics of the SDSSurvey (fig.4, Vestergaard et al 2008)? How could some of the most massive ones already form within <= 0.8 Gyr after the Big Bang? Why do their masses scale as 10^−2.85 times their bulge masses (Marconi and Hunt 2003)? How do they blow their gigantic winds, and why have those winds the chemistry of ashes from excessive nuclear burning, being & 10^2-fold metal enriched (upto Fe)? How do they generate their extremely hard spectra, (occasionally) peaking at &TeV energies, even recorded (from PKS 2155-304) as minute-sharp, hour-scale bursts (Weekes 2007), whilst accreting black holes radiating at their Eddington rates are predicted to shine with blackbody temperatures of KeV(M./M) 1/4 ? Why are some of them distinctly underluminous? Why does their high γ-ray compactness not prevent them from forming jets, in the (10%) cases of their radio-loud subpopulation, via inverse-Compton losses? And, if all the astrophysical jet sources are generated by a universal type of engine – whose powerhouses are newly forming stars (like our Sun, in its past), forming (binary) white dwarfs, binary neutron stars, and AGN – this universal type of engine looks like a rotating magnet, not like a [black hole]..
These [galaxy] centers should behave as flat stars, or as (nuclear-) burning disks (BDs) [Kundt's alternative theory instead of black holes]. Their radiative efficiencies should (i) easily exceed those of BH accretors; they should have (ii) strongly variable outputs, and (iii) generate relativistic pair plasma in their reconnecting magnetized coronae, ready to drive jets; their burning (iv) produces large quantities of nuclear ashes, in particular of iron (Turnshek 1988), and they should certainly (v) blow strong winds (and thereby discharge in mass). And moreover, (vi) these BDs would conform with the cosmic evolution of the AGN phenomenon plotted in fig.2: Their masses would shrink with age – not grow with age, as BH masses must – when they discharge efficiently, via their strong winds... BH proponents are aware of the inconsistent (sign of) evolution.. of course, but have forced it to agree with their expectation by using words like ”downsizing”, ”antihierarchical”, ”co-evolution”, ”feedback from SNe and AGN”, and the like; the BH paradigm must not be sacrificed.
Already Victor Ambartsumian noted.. that galactic centers are observed to eject, rather than to swallow...
[M]idi BHs have only been considered seriously once in 1974, as a possible explanation for the 1908 Tunguska catastrophe, even though no mechanism for their formation had ever been proposed. They were refuted by Beasley and Tinsley [26], based on an absence of tsunamis in the Pacific during the days of that event (which would have been raised by the midi BH during its exit from the ocean, after having crossed the Earth). Note that in my understanding, the Tunguska event has not been an infall event from outside, rather an ejection event from inside, a kimberlite.
Next, explosions of mini BHs have been ruled out by Joe Taylor by a large margin, via an absence of detected radio bursts of the implied kind. And I have never been shown convincing evidence of a maxi BH either, throughout the decades since their proposition [12]. Note that yet another class of BHs has been taken seriously in 2012, when CERN’s Large Hadron Collider was assigned to search for the Higgs particle, quantum mini BHs, much lighter than the Planck mass, whose growth was feared to possibly swallow the whole city of Geneva. Fortunately for our home planet Earth, this most dangerous class of BHs has not shown up either.
BHs have thus remained unobserved objects in all weight classes. Even worse, the book by Yvan Leblanc claims that BH thermodynamics is inconsistent with standard textbooks on physics. A number of further people support his view, among them Vladimir Belinski. The publication of my own reply to Hawking’s launching paper on BH entropy, in [1976], was delayed by more than half a year and eventually printed without sending me proof sheets and with 13 typos added. In it, I pointed out that his definition of BH entropy was inconsistent with the textbook definition of entropy in physics. (Textbook entropy scales linearly with mass, Hawking’s entropy scales quadratically with it.)
Concerning proposals to combine GR with quantum mechanics, my own understanding is that quantum theory must not be applied to systems all of whose particles are purely macroscopic, that is, are much larger than their de Broglie wavelength. This criterion covers also the very recent proposal by Vaz.
The Central Engine of an Active Galactic Nucleus is commonly [and incorrectly] believed to be a supermassive Black Hole, after Donald Lynden-Bell (1969) and Martin Rees (1977). Alternative, more conservative interpretations – like star clusters, or a supermassive star (spinar, magnetoid) – have been rejected by (i) variability arguments: a huge power is modulated on short timescales, (ii) an absence of (spin) periodicities, (iii) energy arguments: is there enough (nuclear) fuel?, and (iv) stability arguments: any other type of engine should evolve into a black hole.
Yet (i) the time-integrated QSO activity should have left more than 10^4 times the mass in the centers of galaxies in the form of black holes than there is now in our cosmic neighbourhood, and (ii) the broad-line region signals as much outflow of mass on average as spirals in, both inconsistent with a monotonic accumulation of mass in galactic centers. Further difficulties of the Black-Hole model are (iii) the hard spectra – occasionally peaking above TeV photon-energies – , (iv) the high pair-plasma opacity – which would forbid jet- formation – , and (v) the inverted QSO evolution – having the brightest sources at the beginning.
For these reasons, I favour a less massive variant of the spinar model: the (nuclear-) burning center of the galactic disk – of mass several 10^6 M. and solar-system extent – which is continually refuelled, and evolves (radially inward) through main-sequence hydrogen burning towards explosive He and ‘metal’ detonating all the way to iron, thereby ejecting the ashes of nuclear burning.
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