Even from the grave, Stephen Hawking is still right about black holes

Black holes, those enigmatic celestial objects whose gravitational pull is so intense that not even light can escape from them, have been the subject of study and debate for decades.

For a long time, it was thought that these phenomena could only grow, as nothing could escape their powerful gravitational force.

Scientists investigate black holes with a new seven-dimensional model

However, Stephen Hawking revolutionized this idea in the 1970s by proposing that black holes can emit radiation, a phenomenon now known as Hawking radiation. This discovery suggested that, over time, black holes could slowly evaporate.

Hawking radiation is based on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which states that the vacuum is not empty, but is in constant creation and annihilation of pairs of particles and antiparticles.

When one of these pairs forms at the event horizon of a black hole, it is possible for one particle to be trapped while the other escapes, allowing energy to disperse in the form of radiation and, therefore, for the black hole to lose mass.

However, this process creates a new paradox that has intrigued physicists: what happens to the information contained in a black hole when it disappears? According to quantum mechanics, information cannot be destroyed. Recently, a team of scientists from the Slovak Academy of Sciences has used a 7-dimensional model to investigate this enigma, exploring the twisting of space-time through the Einstein-Cartan theory.

The model suggests that, by increasing the density of a black hole during its collapse, a repulsive effect is generated that counteracts gravitational attraction. This could lead to a stable remnant that stores all the information of the matter that the black hole contained. Scientists estimate that a black hole the size of the Sun could store up to 1.515 × 10⁷⁷ qubits of information, providing new hope for resolving the lost information paradox.