Hawking-led team addresses black hole paradox in new study

Does information completely disappear after entering a black hole or doesn’t it? That question has spurred much spirited debate amongst scientists, and now, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has once again ventured into the debate to offer some clarification.

In a paper published online earlier this week by the journal Physical Review Letters, Hawking and colleagues Malcolm Perry and Andrew Strominger have weighed in on the so-called black hole information paradox, the notion that – contrary to the tenets of physics which state that no physical data can ever completely disappear – these gravitationally dense regions of spacetime consume everything around them, causing information to be lost forever.

According to Phys.org, Hawking first weighed into the issue in the 1970s, when he discovered that some information (now known as Hawking radiation) can escape, but that this information does not adequately describe everything that is swallowed up by any given black hole. So that begs the question, what happens to the rest of the information once the black hole dies? Solving this puzzle has proven to be most challenging to physicists over the last four decades.

In January, Hawking, Perry and Strominger proposed one possible solution to the issue centered around a series of quantum excitations they referred to as soft hairs. The trio proposed that these soft hairs formed a halo around the black hole and held the data pertaining to the things that had been consumed. Critics of the theory pointed out, however, that they had not explained how this soft hair and the black hole were able to exchange information.

Paradox is one step closer to being completely resolved

Based on Hawking’s findings, when a black hole consumes a part of a particle-antiparticle pair, half of that pair might escape, carrying a minute portion of the black hole’s energy along with it in the form of Hawking radiation, according to the New York Times and Business Insider.

Eventually, that energy would leak out of the black hole until it eventually disappeared, leaving behind no remnants of the black hole except said radiation. So what would happen to all of that information that it has consumed during its lifespan when it died? Hawking’s team initially believed that the radiation coming out of the black hole after it fell apart would be random, and that the information about the material that it had consumed would be lost for good.

That violated one of the main laws of modern physics: that is should always be theoretically possible to reverse time and reconstruct events of the past, as the universe is supposed to keep track of the characteristics of different types of matter and antimatter, even if those objects end up being destroyed, the Times said. As such, their physical attributes should live forever.

Having reworked their calculations and found stronger evidence that black holes are surrounded by soft hair halos, Hawking, Perry and Strominger have published their new study, asserting that this halo is where the information of everything that fell into the black hole during its life span is recorded, similar to “the pixels on your iPhone or the wavy grooves in a vinyl record,” the Times said. That information is not necessarily preserved in its proper order, but it is there.

The trio “still has not addressed [these problems] completely,” Phys.org added, “but they have reworked the math and have found stronger evidence for the existence of soft hairs – if they can do the same for gravity, and show that all of the information is held in the soft hairs, rather than just some, it should greatly increase the chances that one day the paradox will be solved once and for, offering relief for those who feared that the paradox might one day lead to having to toss out some of the most cherished theories in physics.”

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Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

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