Hawking explains his updated theory on black hole at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin, Ireland, July 21, 2004. (Xinhua Photo) 

    BEIJING, July 22 (Xinhuanet) -- Famed British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said he's finally realised that he was wrong about black holes after 30 years.

    Hawking has always argued that a black hole destroys everything that falls into it. However, he said that black holes, the mysterious massive vortexes formed from collapsed stars, do not destroy everything they consume and instead can fire out matter and energy "in a mangled form", during the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation held in Dublin, Ireland on July 21, 2004.

    According to Thursday's CRI online, Hawking's radical new thinking, presented in a paper to the Conference, capped his three-decade struggle to explain an elemental paradox in scientific thinking: How can black holes destroy all record of consumed matter and energy, as Hawking long believed, when subatomic theory says such elements must survive in some form?

    Hawking's answer is that the black holes hold their contents for eons but themselves eventually deteriorate and die. As the black hole disintegrates, they send their transformed contents back out into the infinite universal horizons from which they came.

    Previously, 62 year old Hawking had held out the possibility that disappearing matter travels into a new parallel universe within the black hole ¡ª the very stuff of most visionary science fiction.

    He pioneered the understanding of black holes ¡ª the matter-consuming vortexes created when stars collapse ¡ª in the mid-1970s and has previously insisted that the holes emit radiation but never cough up any trace of matter consumed, a view that conflicts with subatomic theory and its view that matter can never be completely destroyed.

   (Agencies/CRIENGLISH.com)

Hawking explains his updated theory on black hole at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin, Ireland, July 21, 2004. (Xinhua Photo) 

Hawking explains his updated theory on black hole at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin, Ireland, July 21, 2004. (Xinhua Photo)