Professor Stephen Hawking is back with a new theory: the hairy black hole hypothesis. His new theory solves the problem of what happens when information from the universe goes into black holes. His new paper titled, "Soft hair on black holes," could help him win his first Nobel prize.
The 74-year-old British theoretical physicist said that black holes may have a head of hairs made of zero-energy particles. In August, Hawking exposed that he has the answers to the "black hole paradox". In the recently release paper, he dropped the first detailed discussion of his theory in an online published version at ArXiv.
"Whether or not this is the final answer is totally unclear to us," co-author Malcolm Perry, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge said.
"We're saying that it's a step on the way," he added.
Black Holes
According to the theory of relativity by Albert Einstein, whatever goes in the black hole, never comes out. Black holes are so massive that anything going inside or even just its edge is pulled in and lost forever.
The black hole paradox emerged from his own work about 40 years ago. The previous theory proposed a mechanism in which information is lost forever. The paper, written in the '70s, contained information based on mathematical understanding of the time which says that black holes are featureless and bald spheres.
Soft Hair On Black Holes
In the current paper, however, Hawking and co-researchers tackled how the soft hair looks like and how it preserves information? He revisited his own calculations and found that massive black holes have additional distinguishing features known as "hairs".
"We show that if you throw something at a black hole it in the right way, you can implant hair," Andrew Strominger of Harvard University said.
Adding to Prof. Hawking's proposal in August 2015, information was said to not disappear in the black hole but instead stored at the event horizon. With co-researchers, they found that a soft, zero-energy photons retain the quantum state information of whatever comes into the massive cosmic black hole.
Though they were able to explain the presence of soft hairs in black holes, the paper itself admits that there is still a lot of work to be done.
"A complete description of the holographic plate and resolution of the information paradox remains an open challenge, which we have presented new and concrete tools to address," the researchers concluded.
However, not all experts on this field are convinced of the new theory.
"I am not at all convinced that the new idea proposed by Hawking, Perry, and Strominger solves the information loss problem. But it seems an interesting avenue that is worth further exploration. And I am sure we will see further exploration," Sabine Hossenfelder of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics, wrote in a blog.
Photo: Lwp Kommunikáció | Flickr
