This artist’s impression shows the surroundings of a supermassive black hole, typical of that found at the heart of many galaxies. The black hole itself is surrounded by a brilliant accretion disc of very hot, infalling material and, further out, a dusty torus. There are also often high-speed jets of material ejected at the black hole’s poles that can extend huge distances into space. Observations with ALMA have detected a very strong magnetic field close to the black hole at the base of the jets and this is probably involved in jet production and collimation.
ESO/L. Calçada
By Mike Wall
Stephen Hawking may have just solved one of the most vexing mysteries in physics — the “information paradox.”
Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicts that the physical information about material gobbled up by a black hole is destroyed, but the laws of quantum mechanics stipulate that information is eternal. Therein lies the paradox.
Hawking — working with Malcolm Perry, of the University of Cambridge in England, and Harvard University’s Andrew Stromberg — has come up with a possible solution: The quantum-mechanical information about infalling particles doesn’t actually make it inside the black hole.
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