Black holes may eventually evaporate and erase all information about the stars they consumed
Stephen Hawking's 1974 discovery of black hole radiation suggests that these celestial giants may eventually evaporate, potentially destroying all quantum information regarding the matter they once consumed.
Hawking radiation occurs when quantum fluctuations near an event horizon produce particle pairs, causing the black hole to lose mass and eventually vanish. This creates the Black Hole Information Paradox, as quantum mechanics dictates that information must be preserved, yet general relativity suggests it is lost during evaporation. In 2020, computations involving the Page curve provided evidence that information might escape in a scrambled form, supporting the principle of unitarity.
There's more to this story — open the app to keep reading.