Scientists have argued for years that all information is lost when it enters a black hole. It was thought that black holes absorb information and afterwards disappear without leaving behind any traces of what they might have contained.

Thanks to a new study scientists claim that the matter inside black holes is not lost forever. Stephen Hawking was the one who proposed the theory according to which matter is destroyed by black holes. According to Hawking since black holes emit radiation energy it is natural that they would in the end exhaust and evaporate. However the rules of quantum mechanics state that all information must be conserved so Hawking’s theory is in contradiction with it. Indeed, Hawking later admitted that he was wrong and said that it is possible for information to escape from black holes. However the question about how the information can be recovered remained open.

Dejan Stojkovic of the University of Buffalo claims that information is in fact not lost once it enters a black hole. Together with Anshul Saini, PhD student the University of Buffalo, Stojkovic explains in his study how the interaction between the particles emanated by black holes can give information about what it contains within. It can reveal data about what formed the black hole and the features of the energy and matter absorbed inside. According to the study, information about the matter at the core of the black hole can be obtained from outside the black hole. The only thing one needs to do is observe the interaction of particles, such as gravitational attraction.

It seems that this is not an entirely new idea, but this study is the first one which elaborates this idea mathematically. Initially many scientists believed that the connections between particles are too minute so the correlations lead nowhere, but according to the paper the interactions develop over time and grow large enough to affect calculations to a noticeable degree. Stojkovic explains that despite the fact that the correlations are very small in the beginning with time they become so large that they can modify the outcome. These new findings may be a solution to the long debated subject of black holes or they may just stir up the discussions around it.