Since many years, physicists and scientists have been working to solve the mystery of black hole information paradox. British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has indicated on the existence of black hole hairs which are anticipated to form at the boundary of the blackholes. The Blackhole Information Paradox stated that whatever information goes inside the black holes are succumbed by the black holes and are lost forever. But according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, information in the universe is ought to be conserved. Hawking and his colleagues have come to the conclusion that information is not lost inside. He hinted on the existence of black hole hairs which make a kind of two-dimensional holographic imprint of whatever has been engulfed.
Around 1970s, Hawking said that the universe is made up of innumerable virtual particles and these particles annihilate each other when they come in contact with a black hole. Scientist Devin Powell proposed that when one particle is sucked in, the other particle radiates into space. When the radiation starts escaping, it consumes energy from the black hole resulting in the reduction of the mass of the black holes. Eventually a time comes, when the entire black hole evaporates out of existence and the remnant is a trace of vanished black hole which contains no useful information. Thus one can never know what the black holes have eaten and how they were formed. This theory is pretty clear but it contradicts the principle of quantum mechanics which say that information can be never lost. This gave rise to the paradox.
Since the past few decades, scientists have been debating on the existence of black hole hairs. The physicists group have divided into two, one supporting the existence of black hole hairs and the other denying. The debate has reached at an instance that if black holes are bald, then there is no difference between any black hole and they are bound to have the same mass, electric charge, angular momentum etc. Physicist Michael Byrne said, “minute deformities in space-time” – which can enable us to get a bit of information about the origin of black holes and the things they ate!
“I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but on its boundary, the event horizon,” Hawking said at a conference in August 2015. “The message of this lecture is that black holes ain’t as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly come out in another universe.”
Hawking is advocating the presence of black hole hairs. “We show that when a charged particle goes in, it adds a soft photon to the black hole. So it adds ‘hair’ to the black hole,” said Andrew Strominger, a colleague of Stephen Hawking at Scientific American.
“The information about ingoing particles is returned, but in a chaotic and useless form,” Hawking said. “This resolves the information paradox. For all practical purposes, the information is lost.”
While many scientists are denying the new theory proposed by Stephen Hawking and his co-researchers, Powell said:
“No one has yet reported a mistake in the calculations, but concerns have begun to pop up that the theory is at best incomplete. Sabine Hossenfelder of the Nordic Institute for Theoretical Physics questions how much information the proposed soft hair could encode. She also points out that the paper does not explain how the hairs, which would disappear with the black hole once it evaporated, would transfer their information to the radiation that remains.”
Source: Smithsonianmag.com
