Unbreakable Black Holes Show the Solidity of Spacetime

As a physics undergraduate, I have been fortunate enough to be awarded two Bill Frost summer research grants to conduct hands on research in the field of physics. My chosen topic of research is interdisciplinary in nature, spanning the topics of general relativity and fluid dynamics with possible future applications to black hole astrophysics. I study a system called a black string, which is essentially a stack (or string) of black holes that extend beyond our observed universe. This topic is not only elegant and exciting, but also extremely important, being related to cosmic censorship, which is one of the most important unsolved conjectures in general relativity. I began by investigating the beautiful and mesmerizing shape and iterative pattern formed by black strings and found that, contrary to recent publications, a disturbed black string will not break, and is in fact strong and stable, behaving like a viscoelastic fluid. A non-breaking string implies that the singularity inside it will not be exposed, which upholds the long held hypothesis of cosmic censorship. I presented this breakthrough discovery at the 2017 CSU Student Research Competition where it won a 2nd place prize. It is now time to bring this discovery to the premier physics publication journal, Physical Review Letters (PRL) and extend my findings to more general systems with the hopes of a second publication. The continuation of my research investigates more subtle features of the black string system where I use Newtonian calculations to conserve energy and gravitational tension