There is a way to escape black holes: Stephen Hawking claims 'soft halo of electric hair' could let us retrieve information from the abyss

If you feel like you are trapped in a black hole, don't worry, because the destructive chasms may in fact let things out of their grasps.

Last year, world-renowned physicist Professor Stephen Hawking suggested black holes were not the 'eternal prisons' many think them to be, and it is possible for data to escape from the abyss, the Daily Mail reports. 

Now, in a peer-reviewed paper, the 74-year-old has expanded this theory, and confirmed the answer lies in the zero-energy particles, or 'soft hair', that sit on the black hole's horizon.

The paper challenges the assumption that anything sucked into the massive objects is lost forever, and brings us a step closer to understanding black holes, some of the most enigmatic objects in our universe.

In particular, the theoretical physicist has discovered a mechanism 'by which information is returned out of the black hole.'

Professor Hawking made headlines back in January when he told the world he had found a possible solution to his black hole 'information paradox'.

He had come up with a potential explanation for how black holes can simultaneously erase information and retain it.

The paper was published on the preprint server arXiv, so the physics community could scrutinise his work.

The hypothesis has now been peer-reviewed and published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

'They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought,' Professor Hawking said at a lecture at Harvard University in Massachusetts, according to the New York Times. 

'If you feel you are trapped in a black hole, don't give up. There is a way out.' 

In the 1970s, he proposed black holes are capable of radiating particles, and the energy lost through this process would cause the black holes to shrink and eventually disappear.

Last year, he revised this theory by declaring black holes were in fact 'grey'. 

The grey hole theory allows matter and energy to be held for a period of time before being released back into space. 

But the mechanism by which this information was released had previously not been understood.

This latest paper expands on this theory - providing an explanation.

It suggests that particles that sit on the event horizon, the boundary of the black hole, would consist of photons and gravitons, which are subatomic packets of light and gravitational energy.

These very low, or even zero-energy, quantum particles deposited on the edge of the black hole, can capture and store information stripped from the particles falling into the black hole.

This effectively means that while the particles falling into the black hole may be gone, their information continues to linger at the edge of oblivion in this 'soft hair' of quantum particles. 

The theoretical physicist likened the return of information to a burned encyclopedia, where information would not technically be lost, but would be incredibly hard to decipher. 

The researchers are claiming that, while there's more work to be done, it is a promising step towards solving the 'information paradox' - a problem that has fascinated Professor Hawking and others for decades.

In an interview with Scientific American earlier this year, one of the co-authors and a theoretical physicist at Harvard University, Professor Andrew Strominger said: 'We show that when a particle goes in, it adds a soft photon to the black hole. So it adds hair to the black hole.

'And more generally if particle goes in - because all particles carry mass and are coupled to gravity- they always add a soft graviton. So there’s a kind of recording device.

'These soft photons and gravitons record information about what went into the black hole - infinitely more information than we previously believed is recorded by this mechanism.' 

'It is important to note that this paper does not solve the black hole information problem,' writes physicist Gary Horowitz from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in a commentary article.

'First, the analysis must be repeated for gravity, rather than just electromagnetic fields. The authors are currently pursuing this task, and their preliminary calculations indicate that the purely gravitational case will be similar,' he adds. 'More importantly, the soft hair they introduce is probably not enough to capture all the information about what falls into a black hole.'

He said it is still not certain whether all the information swallowed up by a black hole really can be transferred to the 'soft hair', of it is just an energy signature of everything that has been lost.

But he admits: 'It is certainly possible that, following the path indicated by this work, further investigation will uncover more hair of this type, and perhaps eventually lead to a resolution of the black hole information problem.'