Comment by daxfohl

At steady state, a classical black hole is fully described just mass, charge, and angular momentum. So there are no individual particles. Which itself was disconcerting to physicists because in the quantum world, information is supposed to be conserved. But they were okay-ish with it being "trapped in there somewhere". Hawking radiation is what blew that up because now the black hole evaporates. So now, nobody really knows. Lots of ideas, the most prominent being holograms on the boundary, but the math is still far from complete, and obviously experiments are even further.