The grand paradox at the heart of every black hole

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When something falls into a black hole, where does it go, and will it ever come back out again? According to Einstein’s General Relativity, those answers are simple: as soon as anything physical — matter, antimatter, radiation, etc. — crosses over the event horizon, it’s gone. It can add things like mass, electric charge, and angular momentum to the black hole, but little else. It goes swiftly toward and eventually into the central singularity, and will never escape again.

But our Universe isn’t governed by General Relativity alone, but also by quantum physics. According to our best understanding of quantum reality, there’s much more that needs to be considered. Not only are there other quantum properties inherent to the raw ingredients that go into making a black hole — baryon number, lepton number, color charge, spin, lepton family number, weak isospin and hypercharge, etc. — but the fabric of spacetime itself, which contains the black hole, is quantum in nature. Because of those quantum properties, black holes do not remain static, but rather evaporate over time: emitting Hawking radiation (and perhaps even more) in the process.