Black holes don't exist, or at least so says physics professor Laura Mersini-Houghton in a paper submitted to the non-peer reviewed online journal ArXiv:
Back-reaction of the Hawking radiation flux on a gravitationally collapsing star II: Fireworks instead of firewalls
Mersini-Houghton and co-author Harald P. Pfeiffer claim their computer simulations (they never use the term
computer simulation but just refer briefly to "our program" in passing in the abstract, and the term "simulation" appears a couple times in the paper) show that as a collapsing star shrinks below its Schwarzschild radius that a burst of Hawking radiation "slows down the collapse of the star and substantially reduces its mass thus the star bounces before reaching the horizon."
I'm not clear on what the authors think remains behind after a supernova if not a black hole, but their research supports Stephen Hawking's recent announcement that black holes are actually grey holes with a chaotic and very hot event horizon from which energy escapes. Hawking suggests a changing event horizon subject to quantum fluctuations inside the black hole, a sort of "grey area," hence the term grey hole.
I wasn't able to find an article addressing how this research squares with the observational evidence of massive black holes at the center of most galaxies, including our own. Is this new research consistent with a quiet black hole, which is evidently the state of the Milky Way's black hole?
Where are Cave Diver and Son Goku when you need them?
--Percy