Professor Stephen Hawking posted a paper, "Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes", in which he claimed that our current understanding of black holes is wrong. He states that the traditional notion of a black hole's "event horizon" from which nothing can escape, not even light, conflicts with quantum physics. If he is correct, physicists will have to redefine black holes entirely.
According to Hawking, "The absence of event horizons mean there are no black holes - in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinite". Hawking believes that rather than an event horizon, black holes have an "apparent horizon". This apparent horizon only holds matter, light, and energy temporarily, and it is eventually released. This new idea would work with both quantum theory and general relativity's predictions for black holes. It would also solve the "black hole firewall paradox" that has been troubling physicists for the last two years.
His paper hasn't been published or peer reviewed yet. Scientists usually wait until papers have gone through a peer review process before taking notice, but since the author is the famous Professor Stephen Hawking, things are a little different. He has studied black holes for decades. He was the first to challenge the belief that nothing can escape a black hole and he theorized that black holes have a type of black body radiation, called "Hawking radiation".
We will have to wait and see how physicists will revise the theory of black holes. You can read Hawking's paper online on this link: http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.5761
Here's a cool video of Einstein and Hawking in a rap battle : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zn7-fVtT16k
Sources:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.5761
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/stephen-hawking-there-are-no-black-holes-9085016.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation
3 points.
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