Stephen Hawking says there are no black holes
“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,”
There are still black holes
Normally I ignore everything that Hawking says these days, but this is intriguing.
There is an old string-theory-based theory of black holes called the “fuzzball” theory that says essentially the same thing. In the fuzzball theory a black hole is not empty but full of superstrings and the surface of this ball of superstrings corresponds to the event horizon. The subtle point here is that the event horizon is only statistically matched by the surface of the fuzzball, which allows information to evaporate from it without breaking general relativity. So in the fuzzball theory there is no such thing as a black hole.