By John Platt at Mother Nature Network
Photo: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics/Flickr
If anyone knows anything about black holes, it's physicist Stephen Hawking. Heck, one of the theoretical components of a black hole is named "Hawking radiation" after theories that the award-winning scientist first proposed back in 1974. But even though Hawking himself is responsible for much of our current understanding about black holes, a new paper he just released changes things just a bit.
Before we get to that, let's recap our current understanding of black holes. They are regions of the space-time universe, possibly caused by a collapsing star, that are so unbelievably dense that their gravity sucks in everything around them and prevents even light from escaping (hence the "black" in "black hole"). The boundary, or "point of no return," for this gravitational pull beyond which escape becomes impossible is known as the event horizon.
But now Hawking says the event horizon can't really exist. In a paper he published online last week (which has not yet been peer-reviewed, not that Hawking has all that many peers), Hawking comes up with a new term: the apparent horizon. He writes that according to the branch of physics known as quantum theory, energy — aka light — and other information are capable of escaping from a black hole.
Keep reading Stephen Hawking says black holes don't exist (well, not in the way we thought) | MNN – Mother Nature Network.
