A seven-dimensional black hole model proves that Stephen Hawking was right, to say the least.

For a long time it was thought that black holes could only grow, since nothing escapes from them. Later, Stephen Hawking dismantled this theory, pointing out that radiation can come out of its interior and that, in fact, with this process the black hole it is fading away little by little. This hypothesis generated a new paradox; since, according to quantum mechanics, information cannot be created or destroyed in a quantum system.

If the information cannot be destroyed, when the black hole disappears, where does all the information it stored go? This question has been a mystery until a team of scientists from the Slovak Academy of Sciences It occurred to him to do simulations in a 7-dimensional system.

A reminder about black holes. a black hole It is an astronomical object so massive that its gravitational pull does not allow anything to escape from it. Not even the light. At a certain distance from the black hole is the event horizon, which is that point of no return from which everything is attracted towards its interior.

Hawking radiation. In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking launched a hypothesis which destroyed the idea that nothing can escape from a black hole. According to him, if we take quantum physics into account, there is something that can do it.

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that a vacuum is not empty as such. Particle-antiparticle pairs continually form and appear and disappear. If this occurs in the vicinity of the event horizon, it could be that one of these particles is attracted towards the black hole, while another manages to escape from it, being slightly beyond the point of no return. That exhaust extracts energy from the black hole. This is what was called Hawking radiation.

Disappearing black holes. We have all heard the famous formula from Einstein’s theory of relativity: E = mc². Since c is a constant, if there is energy, there must also be mass and, therefore, if energy is lost, for the constant to be maintained, mass must also be lost. That means that every time a black hole loses energy it is also losing mass. They are very massive objects, they would take a long time to turn off, but they finally do.

The paradox arrives. Initially, many colleagues saw Hawking’s hypothesis as nonsense. However, today it is much more accepted. However, it is undeniable that it poses problems, such as the black hole information paradox. Where does the information go?

Twisting space-time. The solution to the mystery has been possible by putting aside the theory of general relativity and analyze the problem with a somewhat more complex one: the Einstein-Cartan theory. The first points out that mass and energy can curve space-time. On the other hand, the second points out that it can also twist. For scales that are not excessively small there is no difference. However, when moving to tiny scales and therefore very high densities, This torsion plays an important role.

A 7D model. Quantum physics models are often made in 4 dimensions: the three we all know and time. However, the authors of the recently published study took three more into account, so that the effects of the Einstein-Cartan torsion could be analyzed. Thus, they saw that when the matter of a black hole collapses its density increases greatly and, therefore, the twisting of space-time is detected.

This gives rise to a repulsive effect, which counteracts the gravitational attraction that would normally take place in the engrossing hole. As a result, the evaporation of the black hole stops, which remains in a stable state, generating a remnant with a mass of 9×10⁻⁴¹ kg.

A remnant with a lot of information. This tiny remnant is capable of storing all the information of the matter that the black hole contained. Specifically, these scientists’ models suggest that the remnant of a black hole the size of the Sun could store up to 1,515 × 10⁷⁷ qubits of information. Therefore, Hawking’s hypotheses are still valid and there is not even a paradox that dismantles them. At least this is not the lost information.

Image | ESO (Wikimedia Commons) | ASA/Paul Alers (Wikimedia Commons)

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