Strange Habitats

Some recent news pieces have expanded possible locales for Life. We’ve looked at…

Supernova made Earths warmed via Dark Matter

…and we’ll look at…

White Dwarf Habitable Zones

…but a new(ish) idea is “failed stars” – brown dwarfs, but smaller than the 13 Jupiter-mass deuterium-burning limit – might be suitable for life based on other solvents like ammonia and ethane, not just water…Failed Stars for Life

Another idea, which Frederick Pohl imagined in his last Heechee novel, is Life existing inside super-massive Black Holes…

Is There Life inside Black Holes?

…a Kerr-Newmann Black Hole (i.e. A spinning one) has a region between its inner and outer event horizons which permits stable orbits, thus providing a locale for adventurous Lifeforms to exist. Just how they would get power for living and avoid in-falling matter from beyond the outer horizon is speculative, at best, but truly advanced entities might want direct access to the singularity that might exist within.

But does General Relativity give us a sure guide to the interior of Black Holes? Theo M. Nieuwenhuizen has applied some alternative gravity theories to black holes, with the interesting result that instead of infinite blue-shift at the event horizon, and even more bizarre phantasmagoric phenomena within, instead the mass of the collapsed star might form a giant Bose-Einstein Condensate, without any of the singularities and weird horizons of regular GR. Of course whether the particular gravity theory is correct requires experimental confirmation, but it does suggest that plain-old GR, as Einstein gave it to us, might be incomplete.