Zee Media Bureau
New Delhi: Stephen Hawking`s (famous theoretical physicist) new theory has startled the scientific world and has challenged the notion about black holes upturning the whole mystery surrounding them.
One of the world`s foremost cosmologists ,Stephen Hawking has worked extensively on the theory of black holes in the 1970s. He had later proposed that `event horizons` are not as impermeable as theorized and some matter or energy does manage to escape from them. This was dubbed Hawking Radiation.
Hawking`s new radical theory suggests that black holes may not have an event horizon, the boundary that prevents any light or matter from escaping the clutches of its monstrous gravity, according to the the scientific journal Nature. What may exist is an "apparent horizon" which is much less tyrannical and only temporarily prevents matter and energy from escaping.
Hawking`s latest paper, titled "Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes" is available on the arXiv preprint server.
This paper according to the journal Nature, is an "attempt to solve the so-called black-hole firewall paradox, which has been vexing physicists for almost two years". Einstein`s theory predicts that if a space traveller were to fall into a black hole, he or she would just shoot through the event horizon with nary a ruffle and accelerate towards the black hole`s infinitely dense core, all the time getting stretched longer and longer like a noodle. But quantum mechanics predicts that the event horizon should be a highly energetic region - a `firewall` as Nature puts it - and the space traveller would be burnt to a cinder instantaneously.
Hawking`s paper is the solution - a third way out of this paradox. He does away with the event horizon, saving both general relativity and quantum mechanics. Hawking`s new idea is the `apparent horizon` where energy like light rays speeding away from the black hole will be suspended. In some cases the event horizon may coincide with the apparent horizon, in others it may shrink below the apparent one.
"The absence of event horizons mean that there are no black holes — in the sense of regimes from which light can`t escape to infinity."
(With agency inputs)
