Particles could be in a superposition of different branes, say physicists.

One of the longest standing mysteries of black holes is what happens to stuff when it falls inside. Information can’t move faster than light, so it can’t escape a black hole, but we know that black holes shrink and evaporate over time, emitting Hawking radiation. This has troubled scientists for 40 years. Information can’t simply vanish.

Now, physicists Kamil Brádler and Chris Adami, from the University of Ottawa and Michigan State University respectively, have been able to show that the information is not at all lost, but is transferred from the black holes into the aforementioned Hawking radiation, potentially solving a long-standing mystery of cosmology.

Over 40 years ago, Stephen Hawking put forward the idea that although nothing can escape a black hole, there should be a certain amount of particles emitted from the outer edge of the black hole’s event horizon. This emission would over time steal energy from a black hole, causing it to evaporate and shrink.