I’m not going to even pretend to fully grasp this, however, I simply had so link to it. Stephen Hawking has published a paper on arXiv.org titled Information preservation and weather forecasting for black holes.
He postulates, and somewhat contradicts his own theories from decades past, that black holes aren’t exactly as we think they are.
The absence of event horizons mean that there are no black holes – in the sense of regimes from which light can‘t escape to infinity. There are however apparent horizons which persist for a period of time.
So, something can escape a black hole’s event horizon? Who knows. But it is fascinating to read through nonetheless.
Also worth reading is Nature.com’s coverage of this news.
/via Hacker News.
Unrelated: arXiv.org came up here once before. What a great repository.