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Scientists Discover Way to Send Information into Black Holes Without Using Energy

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Black Holes May Live Much Longer Than We Thought

Black holes are often imagined as simple cosmic objects—formed when massive stars collapse and slowly disappearing over time through a process known as Hawking radiation. But recent research by Bianchi and his team challenges this straightforward picture. Their work suggests that black holes may live much longer than previously believed, especially when we consider how information escapes from them.

This discovery is not just about how black holes evaporate—it also touches on one of the biggest mysteries in physics: what happens to information that falls into a black hole?

Understanding Black Hole Evaporation

According to earlier theories, black holes lose mass over time by emitting Hawking radiation. This process is slow for large black holes but speeds up as they shrink. Eventually, the black hole reaches a tiny size close to what physicists call the “Planck scale,” where quantum effects become very important.

In simple terms, the time it takes for a black hole to evaporate during this main phase depends on its initial mass. The bigger the black hole, the longer it takes. This phase is well understood using semiclassical physics—a mix of classical gravity and quantum theory.

However, there’s a problem.

During this evaporation phase, the radiation coming out is in a mixed state. That means it does not clearly carry all the information about what fell into the black hole. But according to the laws of quantum physics, information cannot be destroyed. So where does it go?

The Puzzle of Information Recovery

Physicists believe that, in the end, the information must come out somehow. This process is called purification—when the radiation becomes fully consistent with quantum rules and contains all the lost information.

Bianchi and his team focused on this exact stage: what happens after the main evaporation phase ends?

They used two key ideas:

  • The energy flow of Hawking radiation

  • The entanglement entropy, which measures how much information is hidden in quantum correlations

By combining these, they discovered something surprising.

A New Minimum Lifetime for Black Holes

Their calculations show that even after the visible evaporation ends, a black hole cannot just disappear instantly. Instead, it must spend additional time releasing information.

They found a minimum lifetime bound for this purification phase. In simple terms, the total lifetime of a black hole must be at least proportional to:

  • The fourth power of its initial mass

This is much longer than earlier estimates based only on evaporation.

What does this mean?

Even when a black hole becomes extremely small, it still has a lot of “hidden” information to release—and that takes time.

Energy Comes at a Cost

One key insight from the study is that information recovery is not free.

To release information, the black hole must spend energy. But near the end of its life, it has very little energy left. This creates a bottleneck: the black hole cannot release information quickly.

As a result, the purification process slows down dramatically.

The Role of a Tiny Remnant

The researchers introduced an important idea: what if the black hole doesn’t completely vanish at the Planck scale?

Instead, it could leave behind a tiny, long-lived object called a remnant.

They assumed that this remnant is metastable, meaning it does not decay quickly. Under this assumption, the results become even more dramatic:

  • The lifetime of the black hole becomes exponentially large

  • It depends on the square of its initial mass

In simple language, this means a black hole could survive far longer than the age of the universe—even after it appears to have evaporated.

A Strange Twist: White-Hole Behavior

Another surprising result is related to something called the redshift exponent, which describes how signals escape from the black hole.

During the purification phase, this value becomes negative.

This suggests that the black hole may behave like a white hole remnant—a theoretical object that slowly releases matter and information instead of trapping it.

This idea connects black holes and white holes in a new and unexpected way.

Phases of a Black Hole’s Life

The study divides the life of a black hole into three main stages:

1. Evaporation Phase (Adiabatic Phase)

  • Dominated by Hawking radiation

  • Well described by semiclassical physics

  • Radiation is mixed (information not fully visible)

2. Transition Phase

  • Physics becomes more complex

  • Not fully understood yet

3. Purification Phase

  • Information is slowly released

  • Requires energy, so it happens very slowly

  • May involve a long-lived remnant

Implications for the Universe

These findings have important consequences, especially for primordial black holes—tiny black holes that may have formed in the early universe.

For example:

  • Larger primordial black holes could still be in their purification phase today

  • Smaller ones may have already evaporated but left behind long-lived remnants

In some cases, these remnants could last far longer than the current age of the universe, making them effectively stable.

This opens up exciting possibilities:

  • Could these remnants make up part of dark matter?

  • Could we detect them indirectly through their effects?

Why This Matters

This research brings us closer to solving the black hole information paradox, one of the biggest challenges in modern physics.

It shows that:

  • Information is not lost

  • But recovering it takes much longer than expected

  • And may involve entirely new physics

Most importantly, it highlights that black holes are not simple objects. Even at their final stages, they remain complex, mysterious, and deeply connected to the laws of quantum mechanics.

Final Thoughts

Bianchi and his team have revealed that black holes may not end with a dramatic burst, but with a long, quiet process of releasing information. What looks like the end might actually be the beginning of a slow transformation.

Instead of disappearing, black holes could leave behind faint echoes of their existence—tiny remnants carrying the history of everything they once consumed.

And in those remnants, the universe may be preserving its deepest secrets.

Reference: Eugenio Bianchi, Matthew Brandsema, Kenneth Czuprynski, Daniel E. Paraizo, "Minimum lifetime of a black hole", Arxiv, 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.03922

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