Hawking radiation precludes singularity formation?

Laura Mersini-Houghton at the University of North Carolina and Harald Pfeiffer of the University of Toronto have published a paper suggesting that as a collapsing star emits Hawking radiation, it must also shed mass at a rate that would necessarily prevent it from achieving the density necessary to form a singularity. This doesn’t mean they are claiming black holes don’t exist, they’re saying that if Hawking radiation is real (and so far it’s entirely theoretical) a black hole singularity cannot be formed by the implosion of a star.

Of course if a mass is high enough to create an information paradox, would we ever be able to tell if that mass is a point singularity or not? I don’t know, but the non-mathematical parts of the paper are surprisingly readable.