This is the so-called “information loss paradox” of black holes, a problem that has been immersed in physics for almost 40 years and that, according to a new study from the University of Buffalo (USA), does not It is possible: black holes swallow matter, yes, but they do not destroy the information that it contains. The work has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters .
Until now, the theories of physicist Stephen Hawking had suggested that black holes radiated energy and that it evaporated over time, violating the laws of quantum mechanics that establish that information must always be preserved , since then, everything that ended up inside the black hole would be lost once it disappeared completely.
With this new study, scientists have shown, as Hawking rectified years later, that black holes do not destroy the information they swallow. So what happens inside a black hole? “According to our work, information is not lost after entering a black hole. It just doesn’t go away, ”explains Study Leader Dejan Stojkovic.
Taking into account the subtle interactions between the particles that black holes emit, researchers have discovered that these can reveal information about their interior , such as what characteristics the object or matter from which the black hole was formed or even the energy beyond the event horizon (the invisible border that holds any type of matter, even light) inside.
The work, which includes very precise and clear calculations that demonstrate how information is conserved inside a black hole, shows that these revealing interactions between particles can range from the exchange of “mediators (such as photons) to gravitational attraction : “These correlations have always been ignored in the calculations as they were thought to be too small and not capable of making a significant difference. But our calculations show that although the correlations start out very small, they grow over time and become large enough to change the outcome, ”says Stojkovic.
