Space.com by Robert Lea 4/4/2023
The 'Hawking radiation' emitted by black holes may be able to carry information after all, a new solution to Stephen Hawking's famous paradox suggests.
One of physicist Stephen Hawking's most famous paradoxes may finally be solved: Black holes may in fact hang onto information about the massive stars that created them, new research indicates.
This information may lurk in the radiation around black holes — colloquially known as "quantum hair" — and could, in theory, be retrieved to retell the origins of those black holes, the research suggests.
These findings may finally resolve a thorny problem that Hawking was working on in his last years.
The black hole problemAccording to Stephen Hawking's work, radiation slowly "leaks" out of black holes in the form of thermal energy, which has come to be known as "Hawking radiation." But because of its thermal nature, this radiation can't carry information. That means that as black holes evaporate, they methodically destroy all information about the stars that created them. This is contrary to the laws of quantum mechanics, which say that information cannot be destroyed and that an object's final state can reveal clues about its initial state. This problem has troubled cosmologists for decades and is known as the "Hawking information paradox."
"[This research] is the final nail in the coffin for the paradox because we now understand the exact physical phenomenon by which information escapes a decaying black hole," Xavier Calmet, a professor of physics at the University of Sussex and lead study author, told Space.com's sister publication Live Science via email. He suggests a modification to Hawking radiation that makes it "non-thermal" and thus capable of carrying information with it away from the final fate of the black hole.
More:
https://www.space.com/stephen-hawkings-famous-black-hole-paradox-may-finally-have-a-solution
