by Meghna Kumar

Stephen Hawking, world-renowned astrophysicist, recently shocked the science world with the release of his new paper on black holes. Newspaper headlines accentuated only part of the paper in which Hawking stated, “There are no black holes.” But there is more to it.

Hawking’s new theory was titled “Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes” and was published on January 22. What Hawking really stated in this theory was, “The absence of event horizons means there are no black holes in the sense of regimes from which light can’t escape to infinity. There are, however, apparent horizons which persist for a period of time.”

In 1916, Albert Einstein published the Theory of General Relativity. In it, black holes were described as objects in space that pull in anything that passes an area called the “event horizon.” The event horizon is thought to be the region that marks the boundary of a black hole, from which nothing, not even light, can escape. Once a black hole draws something into it, the object is crushed and the energy of the object is supposedly conserved. Then in 1974, Dr. Stephen Hawking proposed that black holes continually lose mass by radiating energy, and once all the mass is lost, the black hole disappears. All of the information contained within the black hole is thought to be lost as the black hole loses mass. In his new theory, Dr. Hawking speaks of an “apparent horizon.” Unlike an event horizon, from which nothing can escape, an apparent horizon releases energy from time to time, so matter that is absorbed into the black hole will eventually be released, although the shape of it may change. Dr. Hawking’s theory is yet to be tested.