Hawking’s paradox has a solution? Scientists on the trail of the mystery of black holes

The late astrophysicist claimed that there is something called Hawking radiation. It will escape from the black holes in the form of thermal energy. Such radiation would be unable to carry information. New findings in this regard are shown in p physical letters b.

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But let’s go back to the beginning of the whole story. The assumption was that when black holes disappear, they also “evaporate” all the information about the stars that led to their formation. Quantum mechanics postulates that information cannot be destroyed, and that the final state of an object must provide information about its initial state.

Recent research shows that information about a black hole should, at least in theory, be recoverable. Hawking’s calculations were evaluated by a research team led by Xavier Calmet of the University of Sussex in 1976. The new approach, however, took into account the effects of what is called quantum gravity, that is, describing gravity according to the principles of quantum mechanics. Hawking chose not to take this step, which could be a source of potential errors.

Hawking’s paradox remained unexplained for many years. The point of contention was whether the information could remain after the black hole had disappeared

As the researcher explains, despite the seemingly insignificant nature of the changes made to the analyses, their impact turned out to be critical to the final outcome. These effects seem to modify the Hawking radiation so that the radiation becomes non-thermal. In other words, introducing quantum gravity into the equations showed that leftover radiation from black holes can contain information.

With the current state of technology, scientists are unable to recover such information, but knowing that it should be possible is very important. According to Calmet, one way to do more research should be to simulate black holes in the laboratory.

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Black holes can have masses billions of times greater than the Sun. Recently, for example, we wrote about an object with a mass equivalent to more than 30 billion stars like ours. At the same time, it is gravitationally very strong: its gravity is so strong that not even light can escape from it. Everything that falls under the so-called event horizon black hole will be swallowed up. This also has a huge impact on our ability to detect such things. Normally, scientists have to look for signs of gravitational influence on their surroundings, or look for radiation created by the friction and heating of matter being pulled in by a black hole.