Everyone seems to think that black holes are like giant space whirlpools where everything nearby gets sucked in without hope of ever escaping. The boundary where nothing escapes is the event horizon, and it's been subject to a lot of debate in the world of physics and astronomy.

Essentially, the reason why everyone's so hot on the event horizon concept is because it poses a stark contradiction between the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. A new team of scientists at the Case Western University are the new challengers on the block, and they're using a new approach to prove their point.

The main contention of the Case Western team is that black holes don't exist, but black stars do. They say that they've proven through a new mathematical approach that an event horizon is an illusion and that matter and light actually seeps out of a black body.

Using a technique called the function of Schrodinger equation, the team calculated that light actually gets drawn to the immense gravitational force of the collapsed star, but what happens  afterwards is that the wavelength of the particles gets stretched so thin that they can't be detected using current technologies. This way, the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics will not be at odds.

Their theory, however, is disputed by other luminaries in the field. "Well-understood findings apparently conflict with their picture. To my knowledge, there hasn't been an attempt to understand how they are getting results that differ from these calculations, which would be an important step to understanding if this is a solid result," says Steve Giddings of the University of California.

The only current hope of finding out who's right is the upcoming Hadron Collider which is currently being built in Geneva. Once finished, the scientific community may get the chance to find microscopic remnants of event horizon traces if they really do exist at all.