New Quantum Insights into Life and Death of Black Holes --Confirms Einstein & Hawking

Their findings dispel the so-called firewall paradox which shocked the physics community when it was announced in 2012 since its predictions about large black holes contradicted Einstein's crowning achievement – the theory of general relativity. Those results suggested that anyone falling into a black hole would be burned up as they crossed its edge – the so-called event horizon.

Now Sam Braunstein and Stefano Pirandola have extinguished the fire. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, they invoke quantum information theory, a modern branch of quantum mechanics that treats light and atoms as carriers of information. The key insight from quantum mechanics is the existence of `spooky' quantum entanglement across a black hole's event horizon. 

 

"Quantum mechanics shows that entanglement can exist across the event horizon, between particles inside and outside the black hole," says Braunstein. "But should this entanglement ever vanish, a barrier of energetic particles would be created: an energetic curtain (or firewall) would descend around the horizon of the black hole. We are the first to show the necessity of entanglement across all black hole event horizons and to consider what happens as black holes age. The greater the entanglement, the later the curtain descends. But if the entanglement is maximal, the firewall never occurs. Indeed, entanglement has long been believed to exist for some types of black holes, taking on exactly this maximum value. Our work confirms and generalizes this claim."

Stephen Hawking was the first to consider information flow in black holes, arguing that aging black holes must hoard information about everything they swallow.

"When quantum mechanics, and in particular entanglement, are included in the story, Hawking's prediction holds for the longest time possible," Braustein added. "Our results not only back up Einstein's theory of gravity, but also point to quantum information theory as a powerful tool for disentangling the deep mysteries of the Universe." 

The image at the top of the page shows combined observations from multiple telescopes of Henize 2-10, a dwarf starburst galaxy located about 30 million light years from Earth, has provided astronomers with a detailed new look at how galaxy and black hole formation may have occured in the early Universe. This image shows optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope in red, green and blue, X-ray data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory in purple, and radio data from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Very Large Array in yellow. 

A compact X-ray source at the center of the galaxy coincides with a radio source, giving evidence for an actively growing supermassive black hole with a mass of about one million times that of the sun. 

Source: The Daily Galaxy via University of York