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The theory relating to black holes have brought endless fascination and speculations. Physicists have been pondering over its role in the formation of universe and its involvement in time travel. 

These questions might remain unanswered as famed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has said black holes don't actually exist. At least not the way we have perceived it yet. 

"The absence of event horizons mean that there are no black holes - in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity," Hawking wrote in a new paper entitled, "Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes," according to nation.com. 

Hawking meant that "event horizons" - gravitational traps from which even light cannot escape, did not actually existed. The "mind-bending theory" as New Scientist put it, will continue to spark debate as it did in the case of black hole. 

"Falling through the event horizon, is a bit like going over Niagara Falls in a canoe. If you are above the falls, you can get away if you paddle fast enough, but once you are over the edge, you are lost.There's no way back. As you get nearer the falls, the current gets faster. This means it pulls harder on the front of the canoe, than the back. there's a danger that the canoe will be pulled apart. It is the same with black holes," Hawking described how event horizon worked. 

However now, Hawking said event horizons did not exist. He hinted that "apparent horizons" might exist, signaling that light technically could escape from the deep gravitational pull of black hole. 

"You could say that it is radical to propose there's no event horizon. But these are highly quantum conditions, and there's ambiguity about what space-time even is, let alone whether there is a definite region that can be marked as an event horizon," said  Don Page, a physicist and expert on black holes at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, according to nation.com.