We live in an orderly universe, governed by laws such as causal determinism; the cause always precedes the effect and not the other way around.

If all the forces acting on an agglomeration of atoms are known, we should be able – in theory – to not only predict how the entity would behave in the future but also all its past states.

According to the laws of quantum physics, everything in the universe is encoded with data about the state of its constituent particles’ quantum. And if this information never disappears, then causal determinism can remain inviolable.

But trust black holes to muck things up a bit. Dubbed the “vacuum cleaners” of the universe, these space objects are bodies that have such strong space-time warping capabilities that nothing – not even light – can escape once it goes over the “event horizon,” or the edge of the black hole.

When they “evaporate,” black holes cause the complete loss of the data it chewed. This unnatural puzzle – also known as the information paradox – has become one of the many mysteries of the universe.

Five months ago, Stephen Hawking, the famous British cosmologist, offered a solution to the paradox, and his paper on the matter has now been published in the peer-reviewed journal Physical Review Letters.

Titled “Soft Hair on Black Holes,” Hawking’s paper challenges previous theories that black holes have no “hair.” His colleagues, Malcolm Perry of Cambridge University in the U.K. and Andrew Strominger of Harvard University, co-authored the study.

In this case, the ‘hairs’ refers to “low-energy quantum excitations” that stores information about everything that has been gobbled up. Hawking believes that charged particles passing the event horizon could, in fact, leave traces in space-time in the form of “soft gravitons” and “soft photons,” which have no energy.

As they change the vacuum of space-time, these peculiar particles allow it to preserve data about the state of the original particles. This data is then released in the form of “Hawking radiation,” which was initially believed to be a random jumble with no useful information about the objects that fell into the black hole.

Event though the new research piece does not entirely explain the black hole information paradox, it is definitely a significant step in the right direction.
Image Source: Phys.org