“If you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up,” Stephen Hawking told his captive audience at a lecture hosted by the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
Underlying his message of calm is a new theory that information entering a black hole is never truly lost. "There's a way out" he announced.
Hawking believes that objects can be stored on the boundaries of a black hole, known as the event horizon, the New Scientist reports.
This latest proposition is built on another theory the renowned scientist had in the 1970s, which suggests black holes release a type of electromagnetic radiation known as Hawking radiation.
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These emissions can pick up information stored in the event horizon, providing a potential escape route from the black hole.
“I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but on its boundary, the event horizon."
“The message of this lecture is that black holes ain’t as black as they are painted," he added.
"They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought.
“Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly come out in another universe.”