In a paper published in the August 12 issue of the esteemed journal Physical Review Letters, researchers at the University of York made a monumental discovery, when they found that black holes tend to gulp up all the matter in their surroundings, but leak information.The new data adds to the growing database of knowledge we have on these amazing structures. We know, for instance, that they are extremely massive, but at the same time very compact, and also that they are able to bend the essence of spacetime due to their massive gravitational pull.
We also know that they can exert a strong attraction force on all matter around them, and that, once past the event horizon, this matter can no longer be recovered. At the same time, the fact that black holes release vast amounts of radiation from their poles has also been known for quite some time.
But UY investigators professor Samuel Braunstein and Dr. Manas Patra say that their new study indicates these singularities also leak information into their environment, which they extract from matter directed through the event horizon by their accretion disks.
What the research suggests is that astrophysicists would do well to change their way of thinking when it comes to these very weird cosmic structures. A rethinking of gravity's role in the Universe may also be in order, the team adds.
“Our results didn’t need the details of a black hole’s curved space geometry. That lends support to recent proposals that space, time and even gravity itself may be emergent properties within a deeper theory,” Braunstein explains.
“Our work subtly changes those proposals, by identifying quantum information theory as the likely candidate for the source of an emergent theory of gravity,” the research team member goes on to say.
“This vision was motivated in part by Jacobson’s 1995 surprise result that the Einstein equations of gravity follow from the thermodynamic properties of event horizons,” the two explain. “Our results actually extend the predictions made by well-established techniques that rely on a detailed knowledge of space time and black hole geometry,” they explain.
What is unclear at this point is how the new discovery will be reconciled, or merged, with existing data and theories. The researchers admit that their analysis is not wedded to standard general relativity, which means that it should be applied to extended gravity theories.
The latter hold that “the black hole area must be replaced by some other property in any generalized area theorem.” One of the possible implications of this may be that general relativity, as envisioned by Albert Einstein, may not apply around black holes in the same way it does anywhere else.
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