A black hole is an object with a gravitational field so powerful that a region of space becomes cut off from the rest of the universe, no matter and not even light can escape these strong clutches of gravity.
Until now scientists from all over the world have tried to know the secrets of this amazing part of the universe, but according to a latest research, black holes might not exist, or at least not exist in a manner in which scientists have imagined it to be. Scientists till now thought that black holes are cloaked by an impenetrable “event horizon” or a point of no return. They think that anything that comes in the vicinity of this “event horizon” has no chances of survival and it falls from the universe for ever. According to Einstein’s theory of relativity light is also trapped inside black holes and no information about what fell into the hole can be recovered.
Its now that the contradiction comes into being, scientists claim that information that goes into a black hole seems to have fallen out of the universe, this theory contradicts the equations of quantum mechanics, which always preserve information.
To resolve this conflict researchers came to a conclusion that the information is not destroyed but it comes out of the black hole slowly encoded in a hypothetical flow of particles called Hawking radiation, which is thought to result from the black holes’ event horizons messing with the quantum froth that is ever-present in space.
Still some other researchers opine that information may not be cut off in the first place so there is no question of it being recovered in any form. To prove this, researchers at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, US, have tried to calculate as to what happens when a black hole is being formed. They have used a mathematical approach called the functional Schrodinger equation. Using this approach they follow a sphere of stuff as it collapses inwards and predict what a distant observer would see.
What the researchers found contradicted the existence of an event horizon. They found out that the gravity of the collapsing mass starts to disrupt the quantum vacuum, generating a “pre-Hawking” radiation. Losing that radiation reduces the total mass-energy of the object, so it never gets dense enough to form a so called “event horizon” and hence a true black hole.
Researchers stated that there are only stars going toward being a black hole but not getting there in actual. These are then called as “black stars”, these black stars look quite similar to black holes. When seen from a large distance, gravity distorts the apparent flow of time so that matter falling inwards slows down. As it gets close to the apparent position of the event horizon, the matter fades and it becomes nearly impossible to detect.
But since the pre-Hawking radiation prevents the formation of a black hole with an event horizon the matter never fades entirely. Hence the information is always there and nothing is cut off from the universe, it is just too fade to detect.
Still researchers from some different parts of the world have strongly criticized this theory, stating that by no means the process can create enough radiation to make a black hole disappear as quickly as the theory tell it can happen.
We hope that future research can give an answer to this question. Either one of the theories is wrong or another possibility is a completely different theory which contradicts both the above mention theories, but finally gives an answer to the black hole mystery.
Via: Newscientist
