Black holes preserve information about the stuff that falls into them, according to Prof Stephen Hawking.
Physicists have long argued about what happens to information about the physical state of things that are swallowed up by black holes.
It was thought that this information was destroyed, but it turned out that this violated laws of quantum physics.
Prof Hawking now says the information may not make it into the black hole at all, but is held on its boundary.
"The information is not stored in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but in its boundary - the event horizon," he told a conference at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.
In broad terms, black holes are a region in space where the gravity is so strong that nothing that gets pulled in - even light - can escape.
At the same time, the laws of quantum mechanics dictate that everything in our world can be broken down into information, for example, a string of 1s and 0s. And according to those laws, this information should never disappear, not even if it gets sucked into a black hole.
But according to Einstein's theory of general relativity, the information must be destroyed. This quandary is known as the information paradox.
Prof Hawking believes the information doesn't make it inside the black hole at all. Instead, it is transformed into a 2D hologram at the surface of the black hole's event horizon. This is a boundary, or point of no return, where escape from the gravitational pull of the black hole becomes impossible.
Working with Cambridge colleague Prof Malcolm Perry and Harvard professor Andrew Strominger, Hawking believes that information is stored in the form of what are known as super translations.
"The idea is the super translations are a hologram of the ingoing particles," Hawking explained.
"Thus, they contain all the information that would otherwise be lost."