Stephen Hawking's famous black hole paradox may finally be solved

Black holes are the remnants of massive stars that have reached the end of their life cycles and collapsed into a region of spacetime that is incredibly dense. They consist of masses of matter packed so tight that nothing can escape.

About half a century ago, legendary physicist Stephen Hawking discovered that black holes function in a way that would change the wave-like nature of surrounding quantum fields, allowing heat radiation to be produced. This discovery signaled that black holes would gradually radiate energy, shrink at an increasing rate, and then disappear.

The fact that everything that falls into these celestial objects would go away, however, conflicted with a rule in quantum physics that states that the qualities that comprise a particle are conserved in the universe forever. This was Hawking's paradox, a.k.a. the black hole information paradox.

How can something exist forever but also disappear? This was the puzzle Hawking first began to ponder in the early 1970s.  

 Puzzle solved?

Now, some scientists think they may have solved this paradox by discovering that black holes have a property that they refer to as "quantum hair," in a theory they refer to as the "yes hair theorem." Their research was published on Wednesday in the journal Physical Review Letters.

"The problem has been cracked!" exclaimed professor Xavier Calmet of the University of Sussex to the BBC.