D-BRANES AND NEAR EXTREMAL BLACK-HOLES AT LOW ENERGIES

It has been observed recently that many properties of some near extrem al black holes can be described in terms of bound states of D-branes. Using a nonrenormalization theorem we argue that the D-brane descripti on is the correct quantum gravity description of the black hole at low energies. The low-energy theory includes the black hole degrees of fr eedom that account for the entropy and describes also Hawking radiatio n. The description is unitary and there seems to be no information los s at low energies.