Prof Hawking has published a new paper suggesting that the accepted view about black holes is wrong.
Well known for his work on the subject, the world-famous physicist is attempting to reconcile the behavior of a black hole under both basic gravitational theory and quantum theory to produce a single unified system.
According to Hawking, under gravitational theory the event horizon of a black hole is such that nothing, not even light, can escape from it. Under a more recent quantum theory interpretation however, the event horizon of a black hole would instead be a seething mass of high-energy particles that would incinerate anything that it touched.
Combining these concepts, Hawking came up with the idea of an "apparent horizon" with no fixed boundary, while re-branding the term "black hole" to the less absolute "grey hole".
"The absence of event horizons means that there are no black holes – in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity," he wrote. "There are however apparent horizons which persist for a period of time. This suggests that black holes should be redefined as metastable bound states of the gravitational field."
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