This data can be stored in the radiation around black holes and can theoretically be retrieved.

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Hawking’s paradox

According to the hypothesis of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, radiation slowly “leaks” from black holes in the form of thermal energy – a process known as “Hawking radiation”. However, due to its thermal nature, the stream cannot carry information, since black holes methodically destroy all data about the stars that created them when they evaporate.

The very hypothesis contradicts the laws of quantum mechanics, which state that information cannot be destroyed, and the final state of an object can suggest its initial state. For decades, cosmologists have pondered a problem that has come to be known as Hawking’s information paradox.

“This study is the final nail in the coffin of the paradox because we now understand the exact physical phenomenon by which information escapes from an evaporating black hole,” said Xavier Calmet, professor of physics at the University of Sussex and lead author of the study.

Calmet proposed a modification of Hawking radiation that makes it “non-thermal” and therefore capable of carrying information about the star that produced it.

Hypothesis about the absence of hair

Black holes are such powerful objects that hardly anything can escape the influence of their gravity. They are formed during the “death” of supermassive stars, which run out of fuel and explode as supernovae. In classical physics, says Calmet, black holes are “very simple objects”:

“They are so simple that they can be characterized by three numbers: mass, angular momentum, and electric charge.”

The famous physicist John Wheeler described the lack of distinguishing characteristics of black holes with what is now called the “hairless hypothesis”. However, despite the fact that black holes, according to Calmet, are “simple” stars that give rise to them, they are complex astrophysical objects, the chemical composition of which is built from elements formed from a mixture of protons, electrons and neutrons.

The search for the “hair” of a black hole

Since 2021, Xavier Calmet, together with his colleague Steve Hsu, a professor of theoretical physics at Michigan State University, has been working on solving the Hawking paradox. In a previous study published in March 2022, the team argued that black holes do have “hair” in the form of a unique quantum imprint in the gravitational fields that surround them.

In the new paper, the researchers re-evaluated Hawking’s 1976 calculations, but took into account the effects of “quantum gravity,” a description of gravity according to the principles of quantum mechanics.

“Although these quantum gravitational corrections are small, they are crucial to the evaporation of the black hole. We were able to show that these effects change the Hawking radiation in such a way that it becomes non-thermal. In other words, given quantum gravity, radiation can contain information,” said Calmet.

In Calmet and Hsu’s first study, a black hole’s “quantum hair” was an abstract mathematical concept, but now the team has identified the exact physical phenomenon by which information comes out of a black hole via Hawking radiation, and how it can be received by an outside observer.

For now, this is impossible, as it would require an instrument sensitive enough to measure Hawking radiation. However, researchers suggest one way to develop this theory is to study the modeling of black holes in laboratories on Earth based on their mathematical model.

The study was published March 6 in the journal Physics Letters B.

Source: Space.com