Pith Number

pith:B4U6JMME

pith:2026:B4U6JMMEEWAU4EDIXNMU7WFVUG

not attested not anchored not stored refs resolved

On the impossibility of observational confirmation of black holes

Thiago T. Bergamaschi

No observational data suffices to confirm the existence of black holes.

arxiv:2605.13901 v1 · 2026-05-12 · gr-qc · astro-ph.HE

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{B4U6JMMEEWAU4EDIXNMU7WFVUG}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

Essentially, no observational data is sufficient to confirm the existence of black holes.

C2weakest assumption

That the defining features of black holes (such as the event horizon) are fundamentally unobservable in a way that prevents any positive confirmation, and that alternatives can always be adjusted to match all possible data.

C3one line summary

No observational data can confirm the existence of black holes because general relativity imposes fundamental limits on what can be established about them.

References

23 extracted · 23 resolved · 15 Pith anchors

[1] R. M. Wald,General Relativity(The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984) 1984

[2] Heusler,Black hole uniqueness theorems(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996) 1996

[3] Stationary Black Holes: Uniqueness and Beyond 2012 · arXiv:1205.6112

[4] K. S. Thorne, R. H. Price, and D. A. Macdonald (eds.),Black Holes: The Membrane Paradigm (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1986) 1986

[5] Do Black Holes Exist? 2014 · arXiv:1411.6981

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-17T23:39:18.930459Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

0f29e4b18425814e1068bb594fd8b5a1a97079df2be665c08d839320c2bc1e9f

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.13901 · arxiv_version: 2605.13901v1 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.13901 · pith_short_12: B4U6JMMEEWAU · pith_short_16: B4U6JMMEEWAU4EDI · pith_short_8: B4U6JMME

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/B4U6JMMEEWAU4EDIXNMU7WFVUG \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: 0f29e4b18425814e1068bb594fd8b5a1a97079df2be665c08d839320c2bc1e9f

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "16391d8b88dfe944c904a7d68fa8fa01d43ac4221d15206f26be0149fbfcc1e0",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "astro-ph.HE"
    ],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "gr-qc",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-12T18:41:08Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "6ea570f2b946f12f666661464e3d1146921dde1c1b41e1cf57865cf28a18d648"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.13901",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 1
  }
}