We know that black holes possess an immense amount of power, swallowing everything in their reach, and that their inevitable evaporation and shrinkage is due to the emission of radiation. But what happens to everything that they have consumed over the course of their lives?
Although most mathematical calculations that examine this issue suggest that everything inside of a black hole vanishes forever, this theory seems unlikely and raises even more questions regarding the nature of black holes.
The answer to this question might be solved by a new study claiming that everything consumed by a black hole during its lifetime is emitted slowly over the course of the later stages of its evaporation.
"The issue was never laid to rest because Hawking's calculation was not able to capture the effect that the radiation, called Hawking radiation, has on the black hole itself," said Michigan State University's Chris Adami, co-author of the new paper. "Physicists assumed that the black hole would shrink in time as the Hawking radiation carries away the black hole's mass, but no one could verify this through mathematical calculations."
No one could verify it because calculating a black hole's evaporation is almost impossible without a theory that combines both quantum field theory and Einstein's general relativity.
Now, Adami and his team have created a new theory that changes this premise and allows the team to follow a black hole over its existence. The results showed that whatever lies behind a black hole's event horizon comes back out during the later states of its evaporation.
In the past, physicists have claimed that quantum information couldn't exist within a black hole during its shrinking, and the current study resolves this problem. Furthermore, it reveals that black holes do not destroy everything it consumes forever.
The team crafted its new calculation by guessing how a black hole interacts with the Hawking radiation around it. Why guess?
"There currently is no theory of quantum gravity that could suggest such an interaction," Adami said. "However, it appears we made a well-educated guess because our model is equivalent to Hawking's theory in the limit of fixed, unchanging black holes."
"While our model is just that-a model-we were able to show that any quantum interaction between black holes and Hawking radiation is very likely to have the same properties as our model," said Kamil Brandler of St. Mary's University in Canada, who co-authored the study along with Adami.
Although further research needs to be conducted, Adami and Brandler's results could help scientists construct a fundamental unified theory of quantum gravity.
The findings were published in the March 8 issue of Physical Review Letters.
