Talk:Dark star

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[edit] Dark-energy star

Talk:Dark-energy star#Dark star
merge with dark-energy star

Found this article today, and felt it is a better/shorter name for it; if they are indeed the same thing. - RoyBoy 800 01:10, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

  • OPPOSE They are not the same thing. Dark stars are Newtonian concepts of stars that are massive, with no conception of dark energy at all. Otherwise, you'd have to merge several other types of articles into dark star including black hole. 132.205.45.148 17:31, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
I'd like a second opinion before giving up on it; however I'd presume putting these linking articles in their respective see also's would be appropriate? Perhaps also with a linked sentence in the article body explaining the difference. - RoyBoy 800 04:49, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
  • OPPOSE No, they are not considered to be the same thing, DO NOT MERGE!! The term "dark star" is used to differentiate between basic old-fashioned Newtonian theory's predictions for objects with a lightspeed escape velocity and GR's black holes, which have the same critical radius but some important differences. ErkDemon 02:24, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
  • Merge removed. - RoyBoy 800 21:51, 21 August 2005 (UTC)

If QM-based ideas like gravastars and dark energy stars are now beginning to proliferate, perhaps it's time to start thinking about a reorganisation: perhaps three main crosslinked pages: (1) NM's "dark stars", (2) GR's "black holes" and (3) QM's modified "radiating black hole" predictions. Then perhaps it might be natural to crosslink "gravastar" and "dark-energy star" pages to that new "QM black hole" page. It's a shame that there doesn't yet seem to be an accepted generic name for a "QM-modified black hole". ErkDemon 02:24, 19 August 2005 (UTC)


A "QM-modified black hole" could be crosslinked with Hawking. That would at least make a bit of a distinction. Tom 07:32, 24 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] reversion, 29 August

I've stripped out most of the last edit as combination of POV and technical inaccuracy issues, e.g.

" It should be noted that dark stars are totally theoretical objects, whereas significant evidence supports the existance of black holes in the actual universe. "

Actually, both black holes and dark stars are theoretical, if you look at unsolved problems in physics, you'll see the existence of GR black holes listed. The thing that confuses people is that since GR is the standard theory of gravitation, we now refer to an object that would be a black hole according to GR, as a black hole. This does not mean that we have discovered that these objects really do have the special properties that make GR black holes "different", it just means that everyone got understandably bored writing "black hole candidate" in full every time.

What evidence would let us verify that the "novel" GR properties for black holes are real? Well, the two defining properties of a GR black hole that earn it its name are (1) the existence of a central singularity, and (2) the total absence of radiation through the r=2M surface.

  1. The first of these properties probably couldn't be verified by an "outsider" on principle even if it was correct - being able to verify total collapse inside the horizon would involve information about the collapse getting out of the hole, which is forbidden under GR. If you can prove (from outside) that GR "total collapse" really happens, you've probably disproved the theory! (see cosmic censorship hypothesis)
  2. The second critical characteristic, the causal disconnection of the hole's interior physics from the outside universe, hasn't been verified, and if QM is correct, again, probably never can be on principle, since QM insists that information must leak out though the surface somehow. So either GR is notionally correct but makes the wrong physical prediction because of masking QM effects, or it isn't even notionally correct.

Since Stephen Hawking's 2004 change of opinion, he now reckons that horizons ought to radiate [reradiate information], and that classical theory must be modified or otherwise "fiddled with" to produce that result. If he's right, GR black holes, in the original sense of the word, don't exist in our universe. ErkDemon 01:24, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

You are very confused here.

Your biggest confusion is between the ideas of black holes radiating and black holes leaking information. Black hole radiation depends on quantum mechanics and was predicted by Stephen Hawking in the 1970's. Hawking's change of opinion in 2004 is about black holes leaking information. Ken Arromdee 04:04, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

Nope, I just inexplicably typed something wierd. Corrected now. faulty connection between brain and fingers. Sorry! :)
One slight qualification, re: your correction ... the statement that "black hole radiation depends on quantum mechanics" is partly true if GR is presumed to be true, but in cross-theory comparisons, its not such a useful thing to say, because outside of GR, similar radiation effects can appear without requiring "spooky" QM descriptions. Outside the horizon, we can describe the "GR+QM" physics as it would be seen by a set of observers suspended in the region, and obtain a description in which the radiation appears to be "conventional " and coming from the r=2M surface, instead of originating as pair-production events away from the surface. So we can jump between "classical" and "QM" descriptions (outside the horizon, at least) by flipping between coordinate systems.
Whether we can also do this for regions spanning the horizon depends on what the community eventually decides are the "correct" QM predictions for the nature of the information that is emitted. If the outgoing information corresponds to previously infallen information, then a classical description might be able to be extended across the horizon. If the incoming and outgoing information is causally unconnected (or connected in an "inconvenient" way), the classical interpretation of Hawking radiation will not work across the horizon. ErkDemon 08:03, 31 October 2005 (UTC)


So it's true that GR black holes don't exist--but no scientist claims that they do, and hasn't since the 1970's. It isn't news. Scientists who talk about black holes don't mean GR black holes, they mean black holes that are similar to GR black holes but with quantum effects added. Ken Arromdee 04:04, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

Well, perhaps you and I have been encountering different scientists! :) I seem to remember a piece in one of the journals a few years ago telling researchers off for doing just this, for claiming that since so many black holes had now been discovered by astronomers, that GR's predictions were now known to be well validated. :( ErkDemon 08:03, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] What's wrong with present article

This article contains a lot of POV material that isn't really suitable Wikipedia content. Much of it could be termed "original research", and it seems to be promoting (in a thinly veiled way) the idea that the modern scientific idea of black holes is wrong and should be replaced by the idea of a dark star. Whether or not this is true is irrelevant. The point is that Wikipedia is not the place for such advocacy to be published first. Wikipedia articles are supposed to be verifiable from material already published in reputable sources... and this does NOT include the drawing of dubious inferences from such sources, nor does it include the critiquing of such sources. Dubiously inferring and critiquing fall under the category of "original research". I think this article should either be merged as historical background into the article on black holes, or else it should be re-written in a more verifiable and less POV way. 63.24.48.221 21:36, 24 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Reference

What is the reference for the sentence indicated in bold here?

QM’s description of black holes is different to GR’s – they are again “dirty” and “smelly”, but although it is agreed that they have about the same amount of dirt and smell as dark stars, it is not yet agreed whether the dirt is “old” or “new”, or exactly what a QM black hole ought to smell of

This sentence sounds very suspicious to me. For one thing, smaller black holes emit more Hawking radiation (smell). But if two dark stars both have escape velocity of the speed of light, the *larger* dark star will produce more radiation (since it has more surface area for matter to produce indirect radiation).

Also, why would the amount of "dirt" be the same? The amount of "dirt" around a dark star would depend on the composition of the dark star and not just on its mass. Ken Arromdee 21:36, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] yep, "problematic" statement identified, thanks

Yep, iffy! A proper qualification (attempted below) would probably be too long-winded, so perhaps it's better just to snip it out. "Agreed" was too strong a word considering the vagueness of "about the same" (I was thinking about the membrane paradigm when I typed that, but that doesn’t quite justify the sentence). Very probably misleading. Consider it gone. Cheers. ErkDemon 05:37, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Discussion

under Newtonian mechanics, the surface of a compact high-gravity body doesn't have a particular reason to correspond to the r=2M surface. For a compact spherical object built from material with a given density, the r=2M radius increases proportionally with the mass, but the radius of the actual physical object only increases with the cube root of the mass. So while (as you say) the radiation has the same difficulty leaving the r=2M surface for "dark stars" of all sizes, one also has to take into account the additional difficulty of radiation leaving the dark star and climbing up to the r=2M surface in the first place. For material of a given density, increasing the size of the body increases this distance between the body's surface and the r=2M surface up above it.

  • Illustration: If I've punched the numbers right … if we start with two identical Newtonian "critical-mass" stars with a surface velocity of exactly lightspeed, and combine their material, then (ignoring the expected increase in density in the merged object) the radius of the new body would increase by a factor of only (cube root two? ~1.26?) while the horizon radius would double. The physical radiating surface would now be somewhere down at (0.63?) of the horizon radius. Quadruple the original mass and the new physical radius is (cube root four? ~1.5874?) times the original while the horizon radius is quadrupled, and the physical surface radius is now submerged even deeper (comparatively) at about (40%?) of the horizon radius. All other things being equal, the r=2M surface is colder for larger dark stars. Taking into account an expected increase in density for "merged" bodies, the effect gets stronger. (someone please check my numbers!)

You are quite right about the dependency on composition! This exercise still hasn’t reckoned in what the supposed density of a Newtonian dark star's material ought to be (realistically) and how much it ought to emit in the first place as a baseline figure before we take into account the reduction due to gravity and the increase due to indirect radiation effects through an atmosphere. I figure the best one can do as a first approximation (when comparing NM dark stars with GR black holes), is to start with a very generic prediction, move away from specifics and assume an idealised gas or dust cloud, without a well-defined surface. As with GR, the gas is going to compact as you pile up more material, but where GR makes the inward radiation pressure on a self-supporting body go to infinity and beyond as the radius shrinks past r=2M, with the NM relationships, the inward radiation pressure never becomes infinite for a self-supporting body of any finite size. You certainly expect compression, but (without getting into specifics of materials and atomic structure) don't have an obvious reason to expect total collapse, because you have at least some outward radiation pressure acting all the way down to the core. The GR argument of zero outward force resisting collapse inside r=2M does not apply to dark star models.

Since this is technically an acoustic –style metric, the further we go in idealising the interior of a dark star to get away from specifics about the exact material involved, the further we move towards an abstract statistical mechanical description, of how indirect radiation through a horizon ought to work in general, and since QM's Hawking radiation effect has now been generalised to the case of acoustic metrics, dark star radiation would seem, technically, to be a case of Hawking radiation (in a non-GR context), and would seem to follow the same basic statistical rules.

Unfortunately, I don’t know of any published study that explicitly compares the phenomenology of the "QM black hole" predictions with the "NM dark star" predictions. When I asked around a few years back there wasn't anything anyone could cite me to say that the two things were in any way distinguishable. The best I could find were studies of the statistical behaviour of a hypothetical conventional radiating surface at r=2M, in the context of the black hole membrane paradigm, which found that once you assigned the horizon surface an appropriate temperature, you could assume that wholly conventional radiation effects were in play, and generate the "spooky" descriptions of QM (e.g. nominal pair production outside the horizon) by playing games with the coordinate systems being used to generate the description. So the properties of (idealised) dark star radiation outside the horizon would seem to correspond, statistically, to the properties of QM black hole radiation, if one can just justify getting the right value for the "horizon temperature", and since QM can calculate this temperature using very general arguments, an idealised dark star model (obeying the same basic laws of thermodynamics, entropy, etc) ought to be at least in the same ballpark. (Maybe even identical, who knows.)

Perhaps a full comparison of the idealised "dark star" phenomenology against the predictions of QM for black holes might have to wait until the community have decided exactly what QM ought to be predicting, at the moment there still not complete agreement about whether the current QM predictions can be taken at face value, or need modifying to prevent a clash with GR (-> black hole information paradox), so perhaps there's not yet an 100% agreed QM reference model for dark star models to be compared against.

Anyhow, the above arguments are probably too long and hand-wavy to belong in a Wiki article, so I think it's simplest if I just snip the offending text rather than find a way of rewording it to be less misleading. Thanks for pointing out the prob. ErkDemon 05:37, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

Okay, it's good that you removed this, but it's only one of a group of similar problems (which I guess I should have mentioned the first time). Basically the problem is that the article claims that a dark star and a QM black hole have similar effects, but without formulas or sources.
This includes the following statements:

[edit] "Newtonian" gravitaitonal time dilation?

If Michell had been given the correct (proportional) relationship between energy and frequency, he would have been tantalisingly close to being able to predict the existence of gravitational time dilation, perhaps one of the greatest missed opportunities in gravitational physics.
Is there a source that says that Michell would have been able to predict gravitational time dilation? (Or more specifically, is there a source which gives a formula for how dark stars affect light and time, and is what the source says the same as what another source describes gravitational time dilation to be?)
Yes, Einstein (specifically, the published translation of Einstein's original 1911 paper on the effect of gravity on light). Einstein's argument is a very general one, and in the paper AE chooses to do the calculation using the Newtonian relationships rather than the SR ones, for simplicity's sake.
Michell correctly calculated the "Newtonian" gravitational weakening of light, and said that light climbing uphill against a gradient would be changed in character and shifted towards the "weaker" end of the spectrum ... but unfortunately, Newton had screwed up and said in print, in Optiks, that the weaker end of the spectrum was the blue end (oops). Newton's gaffe eventually got sorted out, amidst much animosity, in the mid-C19th when it was realised that Newton's lightspeed predictions for a glass-air bundary were also inverted. If you feed the corrected proportional frequency/energy relationship into Michell's argument, then the inevitable conclusion is (as Einstein pointed out) gravitational time dilation. But once Newton's light energy screwup was recognised, the whole idea of light treated as a particle got discredited and the "wave" theorists gained supremacy, which probably accounts for the popularity of aether theories in the latter half of the C19th until special relativity took over. If light was then modelled as a wave moving through a medium, it was less obvious that gravity should bend light, and work like Michell's effectively got erased from the history books as beng part of the embarrassing episode where Newton was found to have messed up. If you check scientific biographies published before about 1970, you'll probably find Michell is only listed listed because of his work on the theory of earthquakes or his work on what became known as the Cavendish experiment. His paper on the gravitational shifting of light didn't get generally "rediscovered" and recognised for what it was until about sixty years after Einstein had reinvented the subject (and taken it further). ErkDemon 02:53, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
With a dark star, there is also a statistical likelihood of some “visiting particles” being bumped out of the star’s atmosphere and escaping from time to time, and with a QM black hole there is a similar statistical probability
Is there a source which says that the probabilities are similar for dark stars and QM black holes? Alternatively, is there a source which gives a formula for dark stars and another source which gives a formula for QM black holes, so these can be compared?

See, the black hole membrane paradigm, as discussed in the Thorne book, on Wiki, and in references provided by them.ErkDemon 04:35, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Also, this statement:

[edit] Effects seen by nearby observers

Both might naively be expected by a distant observer to seem to be emitting no radiation at all, but get close, and the haze of gravitationally-trapped particles (dark star) or virtual particles (black hole Hawking radiation) will register on your detectors
appears to be wrong. Hawking radiation can be detected at any distance, and is only harder to detect from far away in the same way that all things are harder to detect when far away. Ken Arromdee 08:10, 31 October 2005 (UTC)

No, the statement is correct, Hawking radiation is a little more subtle than your post suggests. According to QM, an observer near the event horizon of a black hole sees the region to be occupied by particles that do not exist for a distant observer. Quantum mechanics deals with this by saying that the particles are deemed to be "virtual" for the distant observer and cannot be sensed directly, whereas for the nearby observer the particles are "real". If the near observer decides to bat one of these particles out to the distant observer to prove that the things are real, we say that the physical acceleration has converted a "virtual" particle into a "real" one ("Unruh radiation", "acceleration radiation"). This has been discussed at some length by Thorne and others, who have established that for observers hovering outside the event horizon, QM effects superimposed on a GR background make the region outside the horizon look exactly as if it is illuminated and populated by a completely conventional radiating surface at r=2M. This result is a few decades old (the black hole membrane paradigm). Kip Thorne's book (cited) tackles most of these topics pretty well, if people are bothered to read it. I didn't see the need to offer more specialised references here supporting the characteristics of Hawking radiation, virtual particles, Unruh radiation and so on, because Wiki already has dedicated pages on all those topics, and this is, after all, supposed to be a page about dark stars and their characteristcs, not an in-depth lecture on modern quantum theory.

I've made these edits, in the absence of any sources for the above claims.
See the cited Thorne book, further references that are given in the Thorne book, and references listed on the other relevant Wiki pages. ErkDemon 04:35, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
First, "see this book" is not a source. Page numbers and direct quotes are sources. Ken Arromdee 02:38, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
Thorne has gone to a great deal of trouble compiling almost everything you could need to know about black holes into a single, readable, accessable book, complete with pretty diagrams. It's pretty much a "one stop shop" for the general readership, for all things black-holey. It also has a great index, multiple cross-references, and a very good bibliography for the "pro"'s. It costs about the same as other standard-format paperbacks, and anyone seriously interested in black hole theory really ought to already own a copy.
Thorne's done a great job with the book, and chapter three (cited) deals with dark stars. There are already Wiki pages on quantum field theory, acceleration radiation, Unruh radiation and pair production etc. (which have their own references), and which hopefully go into the sort of detail thjat you require (if not, they should be expanded until they do). But I don't think that a simple page on dark stars contrasting them with QM black holes is the appropriate place to try to explain the basics of quantum field theory from scratch. ErkDemon 00:24, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
Second, I've never heard of anyone using the term "Hawking radiation" to refer to the virtual particles themselves, even the ones which are not made real at a distance, and I suspect your source doesn't either. Ken Arromdee 02:38, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
I'm not quite sure what you mean, here. Hawking radiation is a theoretical effect, the existence of "virtual particles" is often invoked as an explanation of (or mechanism for) the effect, so there's a pretty strong link between the two.
And, again ... did you check the book? Let's look up "acceleration radiation" in the Thorne's book's index: it directs us to a set of pages including Box 12.5 (on page 444), helpfully entitled "Acceleration Radiation":

Thorne: " In 1975, Wheeler's recent student William Unruh, and independently Paul Davies at King's College, London, discovered (using the laws of quantum fields in curved spacetime) that accelerated observers just above a black hole's horizon must see the vacuum fluctuations there not as virtual pairs of particles but rather as an atmosphere of real particles, an atmosphere that Unruh called "acceleration radiation." This startling discovery revealed that /the concept of a real particle is relative/, not absolute; that is, it depends on one's reference frame. …

… What the freely falling observers see as particle pairs converted into real particles by tidal gravity, followed by evaporation of one of the real particles, the accelerated observers see simply as the evaporation of one of the particles that was always real and always populated the hole's atmosphere. Both viewpoints are correct; they are the same physical situation, seen from two different reference frames. "


So yes, according to current theory, someone hovering close to a black hole's event horizon should be able to see a bath of "real" radiation forming an atmosphere around the hole, apparently originating at or vanishingly close to the event horizon, and, yes, if the observer was not there, at least some of this radiation would be described by a distant inertial observer as not just being "more difficult" to see because of the greater distance (as you suggest) but actually _as_not_existing_at_all_ in that distant inertial observer's coordinate system. The particles are "virtual" and "spooky" for the distant inertial observer, and cannot be directly observed, but very "real" and conventional-looking for any observer who wants to be lowered into the region to take a look-see, close-up. Since the QM "virtual particle" description is a bit difficult to visualise, some people have found it easier to work with quantum field theory by taking the "hovering" observers as their reference instead, and treating the exterior of the hole as if it encloses a surface at r=2M that gives off entirely conventional radiation. This is the "membrane paradigm" for Hawking radiation (Thorne, pp.405-411), and a collection of research papers discussing it are compiled in a book of the same name, co-edited by Thorne. The "black holes and timewarps" book has a nice diagram illustrating the duality of the "hot membrane" and "virtual particle" paradigms, on page 443 (figure 12.3). This can be compared with the same book's corresponding diagrams for radiation from a dark star, on pages 123 and 252 (figs 3.1 and 6.8 respectively).
The reason I don’t feel compelled to give supporting calculations for the similarity of effects expected from a conventional hot bodies with those expected from Hawking radiation effects is that the subject has already been done to death when they were thrashing out the details of the membrane paradigm back in the 1980's: Thorne (page 410) says

Thorne: " … the two paradigms give precisely the same predictions for the outcomes of all experiments or observations that anyone might make outside a black hole – including all astronomical observations made from Earth. "

In other words, the external properties of a conventionally-radiating body and those of a QM black hole _are_at_least_ superficially similar in terms of the quantities and broad characteristics of the radiation (notice the understatement). Where there might still be a divergence between the two descriptions (and where many physicists probably believe there should be a strong divergence) is regarding the actual identity of the information encoded in the outgoing radiation. A dark star's indirect radiation shows a correlation between information entering and exiting the r=2M surface, and the exact character of the radiation depends on the constitution of the star. Hawking's abandoned attempt to resolve the black hole information paradox by breaking microcausality tried to argue that the outgoing radiation had to have no link to what the hole had been made of. This now seems less certain, and Hawking has shifted position: it's now being suggested that perhaps the pattern of outgoing Hawking radiation may be conditioned by the pattern imprinted into the r=2M surface by all the hole's material, which could be described as having fallen through the surface when the hole formed.
It is not (yet) clear whether there would then be any meaningful distinction between talking about a dark star whose radiation characteristics depend on what the star is made of, and talking about a QM black hole with "imprinting and conditioning", whose radiation characteristics depend on what the hole used to be made of.
Hopefully we'll get an answer to that one in the next few years. Until then, dark star descriptions are at least useful as intuitive toy models for the exterior physics of QM black holes while we wait for a proper theory of quantum gravity to turn up. ErkDemon 00:24, 24 April 2006 (UTC)


I've also removed the reference to the difference between a dark star and a general relativity black hole--because as I pointed out above, scientists don't think that GR black holes exist.
So, should we also be removing Wiki pages describng the characteristics of black holes according to GR, for the same reason?
No, because the problem isn't just that scientists don't think GR black holes exist, it's that the paragraph is written in such a way as to suggest that scientists do, in order to insinuate that the scientists don't know what they're talking about. The other pages that describe GR black holes have the information in context and don't suggest that scientists still believe them. Ken Arromdee 02:38, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
GR's treatment of black holes is important historically, Newtonian theory's treatment of dark stars is also important historically, and I think its natural to document how the two set of predictions differ -- this was, after all, the whole point of GR's black holes being considered to be a new and exiting topic, it was because the total lack of radiation and the causal disconnect of the interior made them a brand new type of object that had not existed in previous (Newtonian) theory. Some of our greatest theoretical minds wrestled with GR black hole problems for over half a century because this looked like the new theoretical "cutting edge". Deleting explanations of why black holes were considered to be so new (and different to the "Newtonian" objects), because you don't think that the distinction is quite so important now, seems to me not to be a good approach to history. I think that when it comes to editing wiki pages the "do no harm" principle should apply -- one should not delete "unfashionable" history just because it doesn't always play out quite as triumphantly as we would like.
It's okay to put in information about GR black holes as long as it is not presented in such a way as to suggest that scientists believe it or that dark stars are some kind of improvement on it. Ken Arromdee 02:38, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
Science history is messy with lots of false starts, dead ends and flip-flops. IMO, these should be documented where they impinge in a serious way on subjects of interest, as factually as possible, without the editor's pen being guided too strongly by fears of giving the "wrong impression".
Encyclopaedias that get caught straying too far from this principle tend to be held in contempt by readers. ErkDemon 04:35, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

I've also removed the "in brief" section. These sections are bad ideas because they suggest, to the unwary reader, that science once accepted dark stars, then rejected them because of relativity, and now is close to accepting them again. This could give the misleading impression that modern ideas of quantum mechanics are a move towards a pre-relativity world. Ken Arromdee 01:10, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

I think that it's fair to say that followers of Newton once accepted dark stars, that these were generally rejected by "light wave" theorists in the late C19th, and then replaced by the black holes of Einstein's general theory, and that quantum mechanics is now predicting effects that phenomenologically appear very similar (to the extent that some QM guys ended up treating the exterior of a black hole as if it was a dark star-type object, for simplicity's sake, as a way of cranking out QM predictions more intuitively).ErkDemon 04:35, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
I just got rid of the line about a superficial similarity to acoustic Hawking radiation. If the similarity is only superficial, there is no reason to mention it. If the similarity is more than superficial, this claim should be supported, rather than hinted at by saying it's "at least" superficial. Moreover, the similarity between the phrases "acoustic Hawking radiation" and "Hawking radiation" might mislead the reader into thinking that dark star radiation is related to black hole Hawking radiation. Yes, I'm being strict about getting rid of useless phrases and demanding support for claims, but we need to keep the pseudoscience out. Ken Arromdee 04:36, 9 November 2005 (UTC)
Well, I think that anyone who isn't yet up to speed on Hawking radiation should at least read the cited Thorne book before making edits on a page of this type. For the more technically inclined, there's a nice compilation book called "Black Holes: The Membrane Paradigm" edited by Thorne Price and Macdonald, which goes into some detail explaining various statistical effects predicted by QM for black holes, that can be modelled as if the region is thought to contain a conventional thermal atmosphere. It's a powerful tool, for instance, with a conventional star, you can lower a bucket into the surrounding region and pull out a scoop of gas, while with QM applied onto a Schwarzchild metric the philosophical and conceptual arguments about the nature of "reality" and "virtuality" are much more complicated, but again, the bottom line is that if you trawl a bucket through the region it comes out with stuff in it.
Given that the world's leading experts on this subject (Thorne, Hawking, et al) disagree quite vociferously about the "correct" interpretation of some Hawking radiation effects, and seem to be sometimes on the brink of claiming that each other's work is pseudoscience, I think that the best we can do here is to document what we can, be as factual as we can about the problem, and to try not to to prejudge the matter too much. We know what dark star models predict, we know how these predictions compare with GR and QM, so hey, lets document it. Maybe lots of people who are interested in black holes may well not be interested in dark star comparisons, but that's why this information has been put onto a separate "dark star" page where those people don't have to read it (anyone interested in dark stars and reading the "dark star" page probably will be interested in these sorts of comparisons, methinks, it's natural to want to know how these things compare with their more modern counterparts).
I do understand that the functional similarity between the dark star phenomenology and the QM Hawking radiation phenomenology makes some people very uncomfortable, and that since the similarity tends to suggest some sort of deeper link, then in order to emphasise that this link is not there under GR, some people are likely to feel that this sort of "misleading" information should not be supplied to people because they may be "led astray" by it. But I also think that taking a patrician view, that people need to be "protected" from facts that might "confuse" them, does not sit well with the ethos of trying to build a factual, scientifically-accurate encyclopedia. ErkDemon 04:35, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
Removing misleading information is not a condescending sort of fake "protection". As protection, it's quite real. Misleading people is a bad idea. Ken Arromdee 02:38, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
But if you are removing factual information that does not sit well with your worldview, in order to make that worldview seem more convincing to others, then how do you do a sanity-check on your own actions to make sure that it's not actually you who's (inadvertently) misleading people? If you give people all the facts (with caveats as you feel neccessary), and things go wrong as a result, then at least its an "honorable" failure. If you hide inconvenient facts that you feel are undermining your case, and things go wrong as a result, its seen as something rather less honorable. It's a high-risk strategy. ErkDemon 00:24, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] merge not removed?!!

if people removed the merge part, then why is it not removed from BOTH pages? 69.22.224.249 21:56, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Please specify areas of contention to be looked at.

I've been asked by User:Ken Arromdee to take a look at the disputed parts of this article, but am having a great deal of trouble sifting out what exactly is being disputed in the lengthy debate above. If the two of you would be willing to put a point-form list of points of contention below this comment, that would help a lot. To be clear, I'm not trying to act as any kind of arbiter, but will simply (as asked) state my views on the points of contention, where I'm capable of doing so (I like to think that I'm aware of the limits of my areas of knowledge). If things look sufficiently muddy, I'll link the page from Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Physics and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Physics, but from what I can see of the discussion above, it appears to be mostly a conflict of editing styles as opposed to irreconcilable differences over content. User:ErkDemon, is it ok with you if I take a look at this, or would you prefer that it just be put on PNA/P and WPP? --Christopher Thomas 23:46, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

Hi Christopher. Yeah, fine, edit, delete, redirect, whatever. Don't care. Help yourself. ErkDemon 00:40, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Other Definition?!

I really know nothing about this but a number of sites, such as Enchanted Learning use the term "dark star" for any star that has stopped or doesn't emit light, including black dwarfs and brown dwarfs. Could someone please offer some form of explanation? I plan on asking the school physics teacher, but disambiguation by an expert would be more reliable. I'll check with astronomy professors at the university if no one can offer a suitable explanation, but that might take a while. Thanks. DUCK 17:29, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Evidence for relativity

"Since observations all confirm the relativistic version, a dark star could not exist."

Which observations exactly? With no direct reference, validity of that statement is just that bit vague...

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