A Hierarchy of Cosmic Compact Objects --- Without Black Holes (original) (raw)

Abstract

We make the case for the existence of a hitherto unknown and unobserved, hierarchy of ever more compact cosmic objects in the universe. This hypothesis is based on (i) the assumption of ``elementary'' particle sub-constituents on several levels below the presently known, inspired by Glashow's ``blooming desert'' [S. Glashow, {The Future of Elementary Particle Physics}, in Proceedings of the Cargese Summer Institute, Cargese, France, July 9-29, 1979, Plenum Press 1980], (ii) the existence of nearly scale-invariant density fluctuations in the early universe, e.g. as predicted by inflationary models [A. Guth, {ITALIC Phys. Rev.} {D23}, 347 (1981), J.M. Bardeen, P.J. Steinhardt, M.S. Turner, {ITALIC Phys. Rev.} {D28}, 679 (1983)], (iii) our own previous theoretical work showing that a class of objects considerably more compact than previously thought possible in astrophysics can exist [J. Hansson, F. Sandin, {ITALIC Phys. Lett.} { B616}, 1 (2005)]. We also give several independent arguments strongly pointing towards the non-existence of black holes. Some brief suggestions on observational signals due to the hierarchy, both in collected astronomical data and in possible future observations, concludes the paper.