Skip to main content

Stephen Hawking believes he’s solved a huge mystery about black holes

stephen hawking black home hole
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Speaking at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking announced that he may solved the Information Paradox with a new theory that explains how information can escape a black hole, reports New Scientist.

The Information Paradox is the result of two competing theories — one from quantum mechanics and one from general relativity — about the state of an object’s physical information when it encounters a black hole. Quantum mechanics predicts that the information remains intact within a black hole, while the relativity model suggests the information is destroyed due to the immense gravitational forces within a black hole. After more than four decades of debate, Hawking now proposes a third possibility in which the information remains intact because  it does not enter into the black hole, but is destroyed as part of the journey.

physicist_stephen_hawking“I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but on its boundary, the event horizon,” Hawking said.

According to Hawking’s theory, the information about particles that enter a black hole is stored on the surface event horizon in the form of holograms. Hawking argues that these holograms “contain all the information that would otherwise be lost.” These particles may eventually escape the black hole, according to the principles of Hawking Radiation, which describes a way in which photons are released from a black hole as the result of random quantum fluctuations. These escaping photons pick up the physical information stored on the event horizon, but this information is returned in a useless form. This outcome, where information is stored, but also irretrievable, reconciles both sides of the Information Paradox.

His new theory is that Hawking radiation can pick up some of the information stored on the event horizon as it is emitted, providing a way for it to get out. But don’t expect to get a message from within, he said. “The information about ingoing particles is returned, but in a chaotic and useless form. This resolves the information paradox. For all practical purposes, the information is lost.”

Hawking described his theory at Tuesday’s Hawking Radiation Conference with a follow-up lecture by Cambridge Theoretical Physics Professor Malcolm Perry scheduled for Wednesday. Perry will provide additional details on this new theory with a paper from the pair expected to be released next month.

Editors' Recommendations

Kelly Hodgkins
Kelly's been writing online for ten years, working at Gizmodo, TUAW, and BGR among others. Living near the White Mountains of…
Machine learning used to sharpen the first image of a black hole
A team of researchers, including an astronomer with NSF’s NOIRLab, has developed a new machine-learning technique to enhance the fidelity and sharpness of radio interferometry images. To demonstrate the power of their new approach, which is called PRIMO, the team created a new, high-fidelity version of the iconic Event Horizon Telescope's image of the supermassive black hole at the center of Messier 87, a giant elliptical galaxy located 55 million light-years from Earth. The image of the M87 supermassive black hole originally published by the EHT collaboration in 2019 (left); and a new image generated by the PRIMO algorithm using the same data set (right).

The world watched in delight when scientists revealed the first-ever image of a black hole in 2019, showing the huge black hole at the center of galaxy Messier 87. Now, that image has been refined and sharpened using machine learning techniques. The approach, called PRIMO or principal-component interferometric modeling, was developed by some of the same researchers that worked on the original Event Horizon Telescope project that took the photo of the black hole.

That image combined data from seven radio telescopes around the globe which worked together to form a virtual Earth-sized array. While that approach was amazingly effective at seeing such a distant object located 55 million light-years away, it did mean that there were some gaps in the original data. The new machine learning approach has been used to fill in those gaps, which allows for a more sharp and more precise final image.

Read more
Unique black hole is trailed by 200,000 light-year-long tail of stars
This is an artist's impression of a runaway supermassive black hole that was ejected from its host galaxy as a result of a tussle between it and two other black holes. As the black hole plows through intergalactic space it compresses tenuous gas in front to it. This precipitates the birth of hot blue stars. This illustration is based on Hubble Space Telescope observations of a 200,000-light-year-long contrail of stars behind an escaping black hole.

Black holes might have a reputation as terrifying monsters, devouring all they come into contact with -- but they can be a force of creation too, feeding the formation of new stars. Researchers using data from the Hubble Space Telescope recently spotted an unexpectedly huge trail of stars forming in the wake of a rogue black hole.

While most very large black holes, called supermassive black holes, sit at the center of galaxies, occasionally these enormous beasts can be found wandering alone in the depths of space. That's the case with the recently discovered black hole with the mass of 20 million suns, which is streaking through the sky at tremendous speed. This likely began with two galaxies merging, each with its own supermassive black hole, which formed a binary system. Then a third galaxy got too close, and in the chaos of a three-way merger one of the black holes was kicked out and sent zipping off into space -- so fast that if it were in our solar system, it would travel from the Earth to the moon in 14 minutes.

Read more
Hubble spots an ancient pair of supermassive black holes about to merge
This artist's concept shows the brilliant glare of two quasars residing in the cores of two galaxies that are in the chaotic process of merging. The gravitational tug-of-war between the two galaxies ignites a firestorm of star birth.

The hearts of some galaxies glow so brightly that they are given a special name: Quasars. Powered by supermassive black holes at the center of these galaxies, these regions give off tremendous amounts of light as gas falls towards the black hole and heats up, resulting in a glow as powerful as over 100 billion stars. Recently, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope spotted two of these quasars burning brightly in the night sky -- and they're on a collision course.

The pair of quasars, known as SDSS J0749+2255, are from some of the earliest stages of the universe when it was just 3 billion years old. The two galaxies that host the quasars are in the process of merging, and eventually, the two will come together to form one enormous galaxy.

Read more