8 Things You've Always Wanted To Know About Black Holes
6. Event Horizons (And Why Black Holes Don't Exist)
So, singularities aren't real and, as it turns out, that other iconic element of black holes, the event horizon, might not be either.
The general idea is that the event horizon is the point of no return, but if that's the case then what happens to all the stuff that falls into it? Stephen Hawking famously said in a recent paper that "there are no black holes" (which the press promptly took out of all context and proportion, yay). What he actually said was The absence of event horizons means that there are no black holes in the sense of regimes from which light cant escape to infinity.
Hawking wasn't actually saying that black holes don't exist, he was just saying that they don't behave in quite the same way that we thought. The latest thinking is that falling into a black hole might not quite be as final as we once thought and, what we think of as the event horizon might not be so point of no return-y as we once thought. He reckons that there is also an "apparent horizon" which is a bit like an event horizon but not quite as scary.
Hawking is basically the mack daddy of black holes, so let's take a closer look at some of Big Steve's thoughts on these mysterious objects.