According to the celebrated physicist, the hole “would need to be large and if it was rotating it might have a passage to another universe.”

“The existence of alternative histories with black holes suggests this [passage] might be possible,” Hawking said at a public lecture in Stockholm, as cited in the blog of the Swedish KTH Royal Institute of Technology. 

“But you couldn’t come back to our universe. So although I’m keen on space flight, I’m not going to try that,” Hawking added.

Black holes are not “the eternal prisons they were once thought,” said the scientist, adding that “things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly come out in another universe.”

“If you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up. There’s a way out,” Hawking encouraged the audience.

He put forward a theory that black holes do not actually swallow and destroy physical objects. According to Hawking, they can store the information about the object in a two-dimensional hologram at the surface of the black hole’s event horizon, which then becomes severely “jumbled up.” This information is stored in the form of so-called “super translations.”

“The information is not stored in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but in its boundary – the event horizon,” he said. “The idea is the super translations are a hologram of the ingoing particles. Thus they contain all the information that would otherwise be lost.”

A black hole has a powerful cosmic mass with an enormous gravitational pull, where nothing can escape, including light. Their formation and properties have long been under the spotlight of scientists.

Earlier in August, NASA scientists discovered a black hole just 50,000 times the mass of the Sun, which is tiny by cosmic standards.

In July, British astronomers from Durham University found five “supermassive” massive black holes, which had previously been hidden under layers of dust and gas. Scientists are not ruling out the existence of millions of giant black holes in the universe still hidden from view.

Credit: RT,com