Black holes ain't that black then?
Hawking loses a bet
Not that other physics wizard defeated him, but he himself changed his mind. In 1997, Stephen Hawking placed a bet with unconvinced American theoretical physicist John Preskill, where he posited information was indeed lost in the maelstrom, its destiny anywhere from complete oblivion to jumping into other parallel universes. Preskill was not ready to relinquish from the Second Principle even within the extreme environment of a black hole's heart, and accepted the bet. If Hawking was proved incorrect, the prize for Preskill was to be gifted with ... a baseball encyclopedia.
Fair as it should be, Hawking announced at a conference in Dublin, July 2004, he was retracting from his former position and conceding the bet (he tried to negotiate a cricket encyclopedia given a baseball one was pretty hard to find in GB but Preskill was adamant). The result comes from mind boggling calculations made by Hawking, whereby he asserts he can demonstrate information as contained in the original infalling matter, is carried away within our own Universe in the form a Hawking radiation. The information is there, but mangled in a way that makes it essentially impossible to decode.
Not that everyone is convinced with the new theory anyway, several important theoreticians disagree with Hawking, but this is another story anyway.
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We pointed in a previous article to the evidence for a supermassive black hole quietly munching frugal tidbits of matter once in a while at the core of the Milky Way. The radiation coming from the source Sagittarius A* mostly in X-rays being convincing evidence for the death throes of wisps of ultra hot gas accelerated to nearly the speed of light before crossing the event horizon. Astronomers in a team led by Jean-Pierre Maillard from the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, announced recently the discovery of an X-ray source named IRS 13 was a cluster of fast orbiting stars around a massive object. Gathering data from the Gemini North telescope atop Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and further observations by Chandra and Hubble space telescopes, it was possible to nail the object's mass at approximately 1300 times the Sun's mass, placing it squarely in the realm of intermediate size black holes. IRS 13 in turn revolves around Sag A*, which weights in at 2.6 million Sun masses.
And the next ones may well be inside complex contraptions sitting atop some laboratory table. Physicists are eager to test Hawking's theories, and envision the
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