Can the black and white holes combine?

No, it can't. Even assuming a white hole could exist (which it can't, really--see below), it couldn't approach a black hole, because the only way for a white hole to exist would entail it being in a completely separate region of spacetime from the black hole. (Basically, the black hole is in the future and the white hole is in the past; there's no way for the white hole to "move" from the past to the future.)

The reason a white hole can't actually exist is that there is no way for it to come into being. One way of describing why this is is to observe that the mathematical solution that describes a white hole is the time reverse of the one that describes a black hole; so just as nothing can get out of a black hole, nothing can get *into* a white hole. But that means there's no way for it to form; it would have had to magically be there in the past, with no physical way for it to have gotten there. (A black hole, on the other hand, can form from the collapse of a massive object; since the black hole is in the future, the object can be there before the hole is, so the hole can form from the object.)

 

No, it isn't. A white hole doesn't occupy the entire universe; there is also a past infinity in the white hole spacetime representing a region outside the hole. The Big Bang occupied the entire universe, so it could not have been a white hole.

 

We don't see the actual black holes themselves; that's not possible, because light can't escape from a black hole. We see the gravitational effects of the holes on objects near them.

 

This is an article about a speculation that our universe could have formed from the interior of a black hole in some previous universe. That's not the same as saying that the Big Bang was a white hole; first, in the previous universe, a white hole would not be the same as a black hole; second, even if our Big Bang was caused by a "baby universe" being born inside a black hole from a previous universe, the Big Bang still would occupy *our* entire universe, and hence would not be a white hole.

 

In the sense of "now" that matters, yes, they exist now. But the sense of "now" that matters might not be the sense of "now" that you are accustomed to.

The black hole is an entire region of spacetime inside the event horizon. Strictly speaking, that region of spacetime does not exist "now" or "in the future"; it just is, just as spacetime in its entirety just is. To say that the black hole exists is just to say that the spacetime of our universe includes at least one region inside an event horizon. There is no time attached to that statement: it's just a statement about spacetime, period.

However, we here on Earth also occupy a region of spacetime, and if we ask the question, how is the region of spacetime we occupy related to the region of spacetime that is the black hole, the answer is that there is a portion of the black hole region that is in our future, here on Earth, but there is no portion that is in our past. The portion of the black hole that is not in our future, here on Earth, is in our "now", which just means it's spacelike separated from us. The fact that there *is* a portion of the black hole region that is in our "now" is why we can say that the black hole exists "now".

Conversely, if we were in a spacetime where a white hole was present, and we were on some planet far away from the hole, then a portion of the region of the spacetime that was the white hole would be in our *past*, and the remaining portion would be in our "now", but there would be *no* portion that was in our future. That's the key difference between a white hole and a black hole that I was alluding to when I said a black hole is in our future (strictly speaking, a portion of it is in our future but none of it is in our past), but a white hole would be in our past (strictly speaking, a portion of it would be in our past but none of it would be in our future).