Black holes, which are formed from the death of a star, are entities far out in outer space with such large gravitational pulls that nothing, not even light, can escape its fury. They’re difficult to see, but it’s possible to trace them by looking for the occasional beams of light or radiation.
Black holes are known to bend light and thought to bend time, as well as cause strange effects on the matter around them while they move, which is why scientists are still fascinated and continue to scratch their heads about them.
One of the most well-known minds to study the subject of black holes is physicist Stephen Hawking, who has contributed many theories to the phenomenon that are black holes.
Hawking has made a presentation on Tuesday at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden suggesting a modified theory on black holes that may answer the information paradox that continues to baffle physicists. It has been thought for decades that any and all information that gets sucked into a black hole is there to stay, forever, and will never go anywhere because of the massive gravity these entities have.
The theory is that perhaps information that goes into black holes doesn’t get trapped inside the deep, dark core forever after all, and instead, perhaps it floats around on the black hole’s event horizon, which the glassy part surrounding the black hole that appears to bend as they move.
Being right on the edge of the black hole, it is possible for information to break free of the massive gravitational pull from the event horizon, suggesting that not everything that gets put near a black hole is lost for good.
"I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but in its boundary, the event horizon," Hawking said. “The information is stored in a super translation of the horizon that the ingoing particles cause,” which leads to the information paradox that we know about today.
Hawking proposes that instead of being lost forever, perhaps this information that enters the boundaries of the black hole will be translated into a hologram, or appear in a parallel universe of some kind. In this sense, the information isn’t lost, but it isn’t useful anymore either. This is the “paradox” that scientists can’t explain.
Hawking Radiation plays a role in information being able to break free of a black hole, but the information will not be complete in this sense, and this means that the pieces of information would have to be put back together again to be useful again.
"The message of this lecture is that black holes aren’t as black as they are painted,” Hawking said.
You can watch the full lecture below:
Source: KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Space & Astronomy
AUG 25, 2015