LONDON, July 15 (UPI) -- Famed British cosmologist Stephen Hawking claims to have solved one of the greatest mysteries of black holes.
Hawking will tell a scientific conference next week that black holes are not as all-consuming as physicists once thought, New Scientist magazine reported Thursday.
Conventional physics says black holes must destroy everything that falls into them, from giant stars to clouds of interstellar dust and gas. Their gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape.
Hawking now says, however, some matter sucked into black holes actually might disperse back out over extremely long timescales. This property could in some way be related to how black holes enable galaxy formation, because super-massive holes may lie at the center of all galaxies.
Hawking's new theory adds to his proposal in 1975 that black holes emit tiny amounts of radiation, now called Hawking radiation. Eventually, he said, all black holes will evaporate.
The paradox of the theory, however, is the radiation would carry no information about the matter sucked into the black hole. Once a black hole evaporated, that information would be lost -- a conclusion that contradicts the laws of quantum mechanics.
Now Hawking is proposing that black holes may not be one-way streets after all, allowing small amounts of information to seep out gradually over billions of years.
