Saturday, June 11, 2016

Black Hole Exit


Previously, we thought black holes just swallowed up and destroyed everything for good. If you fell into a black hole, there'd be no coming out. Then, in the 1970s, Hawking proposed that radiation can actually escape from a black hole. Basically this happens when a black hole swallows one of two entangled particles. The one that isn't swallowed escapes from the black hole in the form of radiation.

The problem is that this radiation wouldn't carry any record of information about the particle that fell into the black hole. That doesn't match up with one of the pillars of physics: Theoretically, if we were to reverse time, the universe would look the same whether it's going forward or backward.

Thing is, that principle doesn't work if information in the universe gets erased by a black hole.
Thus the black hole information paradox was born. It's remained unsolved ever since.

Now, Hawking and two colleagues, Malcolm Perry and Andrew Strominger, think they're getting close to a solution. In their paper, they argue black holes might be covered with "soft hair" — a layer of zero-energy particles that record information about any objects that fall in. A pattern of all the things a black hole has ever swallowed gets imprinted on the hair.


Read the paper:
http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.231301

Articles:http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/07/science/stephen-hawking-black-holes.html?_r=0
https://mic.com/articles/145622/stephen-hawking-black-hole-theory#.c5DrbDgkY

No comments:

Post a Comment