Stephen Hawking Says Black Holes Are More Like 'Grey Holes'
When Stephen Hawking writes something, you pay attention. And Hawking's latest piece, a four page paper titled "Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes," definitely deserves a look. Mainly because Hawking has changed the game on black holes. Again. While most theorize that there is a certain point in a black hole where nothing — not even light — can escape, Hawking now says that's wrong. It's just how Hawking rolls. He shifts theories just by thinking about them.
In his paper, Hawking goes against standard black hole thought by saying that the event horizon — the "point of no return" in a black hole — is more of an "apparent horizon," in which some things might be able to escape. "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," writes Hawking. "There are however apparent horizons which persist for a period of time. This suggests that black holes should be redefined as metastable bound states of the gravitational field."
Essentially, Hawking is suggesting that the event horizon isn't a specific, stable thing. It's constantly shifting, and when one of these movements occurs, it's possible for light to escape. Therefore a black hole is really more of a grey hole. And though information (or whatever) can leave the black hole, it is bound to be thoroughly mangled.
This new idea about the black hole is bad news for the team of scientists attempting to take the first ever photograph of the space event. A $19 million grant from the European Research Council is being used to build a camera designed to take a photo of the event horizon, thus proving the black hole. But they might want to reconsider their plans after reading Hawking's paper.
Of course, that's what every expert is doing. Like we said, when Hawking writes about anything, people perk up. Now Hawking is saying the black hole theory — which he created — is incorrect. Naturally, scientists are buzzing about it. "It is not clear what he expects the infalling observer to see," Joseph Polchinski, a scientist the University of California, told New Scientist. "It almost sounds like he is replacing the firewall [a theory that says any information escaping the black hole would simply be a ball of fire] with a chaos-wall, which could be the same thing." Another astrophysicist added that Hawking's take "lacks evidence." Yet another claimed that Hawking's paper was "short and does not have a lot of detail."
No matter what the science community thinks of Hawking's new "grey hole" idea, one thing is clear: They're thinking about it. Which means that even at 72 years old, Hawking is still a rad scientist. There's nothing grey about that.
[Image via Flickr - Phil Plait & Wikimedia Commons - ²°¹°°]
