Black holes keep their clothes
Dec. 10, 2010
It was suggested some months ago that black holes might be destroyed by throwing high-energy point particles at them. Now, Enrico Barausse, Vitor Cardoso and Gaurav Khanna showed that such a process does not appear to be possible, in a paper to appear in Physical Review Letters. There is a mechanism, known as self-force, which acts to prevent black hole destruction: the black hole shrinks in such a way that the particle just flies-by. Read the news blurb at Physics Buzz