Showing papers by "Max K. Wallis published in 2013"

Supermassive galactic centre with repulsive gravity

Abstract: Repulsive gravity has its origin in the 1939 article of Oppenheimer and Snyder which describes a collapsar, that is an idealized star of non-interacting material (dust) collapsing under its own gravity. The stellar material has a final state resembling a football, that is a significant part of it is concentrated in a thin surface shell. An interior pressure is exerted by the strong gravitational field, equivalent to a negative mass. However, the OS solution has been misunderstood, the shell's position being incorrectly identified with the "event horizon" in black-hole theory. While half the material is concentrated in a shell occupying a small fraction of the radius, some material is spread throughout the interior, unlike the concentration in a black hole's singularity. We deal with the singularity in density at the shell surface, by including Fermi pressure of degenerate electrons for a shell density comparable to a solar mass-sized white dwarf. Because the high-density region is concentrated in a shell, instead of at the centre as in a black hole, our conclusion is that repulsive gravity enables the existence of supermassive white dwarfs.