Hawking plugs a few holes in his black hole theory

His answer is that the black holes hold their contents for eons but themselves eventually deteriorate and die. As the black hole disintegrates, they send their transformed contents into the universal horizons from where they came.

Previously, Hawking, 62, had held out the possibility that disappearing matter travels through the black hole to a new parallel universe, the very stuff of science fiction. ‘‘There is no baby universe branching off, as I once thought. The information remains firmly in our universe,’’ Hawking said.

‘‘If you jump into a black hole, your mass energy will be returned to our universe, but in a mangled form, which contains the information about what you were like, but in an unrecognisable state.’’

He added, ‘‘It is great to solve a problem that has been troubling me for nearly 30 years, even though the answer is less exciting than the alternative I suggested.’’

Hawking pioneered the understanding of black holes — the matter-consuming vortexes created when stars collapse — in the mid-1970s. He has previously insisted that the holes emit radiation but never cough up any trace of matter consumed, a view that conflicts with subatomic theory and its view that matter can never be completely destroyed. — (PTI)