Stephen Hawking has published a new paper on the theory of black holes, in which he and his colleagues refute the "no hair theorem" for black holes and describe how information escapes from it.
British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking admitted that black holes do not irrevocably absorb information - some of it seeps out in the form of "soft hair" - photons with almost zero energy, according to an article posted in the Cornell University electronic library.
For quite a long time, scientists believed that matter swallowed by a black hole is not able to leave its limits. Scientists have described one side of this phenomenon since the 60s of the last century with a short but succinct phrase - “a black hole has no hair”, which means that all black holes with the same mass, charge and rotation speed will look and be described exactly the same.
The situation became much more complex and controversial in 1975, when the famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking showed that black holes would gradually "evaporate" due to quantum effects at their event horizon, emitting energy in the form of Hawking radiation.
This has become a big problem for theorists, since the evaporation of black holes and the creation of such radiation implies that almost all information about the quantum state of the particles "eaten" by the black hole, with the exception of their mass, charge and rotation rate, will be irretrievably lost, which is not can occur according to the laws of quantum physics.
Hawking and his colleagues now suggest that this is actually not the case. In their new article, which has not yet been accepted for publication in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, they argue that some of the information will burst out in the form of photons with almost zero energy, remaining in the place of the evaporating black hole.
Such particles of light, which the authors of the article call "soft photons", are present in huge quantities in the Universe, but it is practically impossible to detect them with the help of modern devices due to their ultra-low energy.
By adding such particles to the equations describing the behavior of black holes, Hawking and his colleagues found that these photons would act as carriers of information, which would record data about some of the properties of particles "eaten" by the black hole. It will be extremely difficult to extract information from them, even if scientists manage to find a way to interact with these photons - the authors of the article compare this with the task of finding out what burned in a fire, looking at smoke and flames.
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The consequence of the existence of these photons will be that instead of a clear line of the event horizon, the black hole will have a peculiar set of “hairs” of “soft photons”, on which, as on a hologram, part of the information about the absorbed particles will be recorded. This peculiar "screen" will update its contents every time the black hole emits another portion of Hawking radiation, which will further complicate its study. Nevertheless, Hawking and his colleagues believe that such an idea allows us to resolve the information paradox without resorting to fantastic and unlikely assumptions and deviations from modern physical theories.
