For years, scientists have believed that black holes are a portal to no-return. Astronauts in movies fear the mouths of black holes because the nothingness extends into an unknown forever. Black holes have been known as Bermuda Triangles of space - what goes in is lost forever.
Or so we thought.
"According to our work, information isn't lost once it enters a black hole," said Dejan Stojkovic, an associate professor of physics at the University at Buffalo, according to a press release. "It doesn't just disappear."
The study suggests that the particles that a black hole emits can provide clues about what is inside the black hole and how the black hole initially formed. Stojkovic claims his paper, written with Anshul Saini, provides mathematical backup to the theory.
The "information loss paradox" has been a nagging problem for physics since Stephen Hawking first proposed 40 years ago that black holes could radiate energy and evaporate over time. That theory suggested that information inside a black hole would be lost forever, which contradicted quantum mechanics - information must be conserved. (Hawking later said he was wrong and that information can escape black holes, but the topic remained unresolved).
Stojkovic and Saini's paper takes into account the interactions between the emitted particles - not just looking at the particles themselves.
"These correlations were often ignored in related calculations since they were thought to be small and not capable of making a significant difference," Stojkovic said, according to the press release. "Our explicit calculations show that though the correlations start off very small, they grow in time and become large enough to change the outcome."
Reference:
"Radiation from a Collapsing Object is Manifestly Unitary," Anshul Saini and Dejan Stojkovic, Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 111301, 17 March 2015 [https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.111301, preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.01487].
The study was partially funded by the National Science Foundation.
