White holes

Abstract

A WHITE hole is considered to be any object which emerges through a past ‘Schwarzschild sphere’. Recently Gribbin¹ has given a popular account of white holes. These objects were first considered by Novikov² and by Ne'eman³ as ‘lagging cores’, parts of the initial big bang long delayed in their expansion. Szekeres⁴ discovered that a canonical white hole was unstable due to a blueshift divergence along the past ‘Schwarzschild sphere’. Eardley⁵ argued that catastrophic accretion would reconverge outgoing photons so that a white hole would inevitably appear to an external observer as a black hole. Here we show that observable white holes ought to be considered as undelayed local inhomogeneities in the big bang, and we distinguish those white holes which we are most likely to ‘see’ today.