8 Things You've Always Wanted To Know About Black Holes

4. "Hairy" Black Holes

Hawking's latest thoughts on black holes is that they are "hairy". No, that's not a typo. Hairy.

There are two schools of thought on black holes: That they are "bald" and featureless, meaning that they would all be completely identical, or that they have tiny deformities on their surfaces, or "hair". This hair could be the key to how black holes return their information to the universe.

The idea is that, when charged particles enter a black hole, they leave a sort of two-dimensional imprint on its surface, a hologram. This adds the "hair" to the black hole, making it slightly different from other back holes and therefore retaining the information that went into it.

What Hawking radiation leak out of the black hole, it picks up some of this information and puts it back into the universe, all safe and sound.

Not everyone is convinced, however, and concerns popped up almost as soon as the latest paper appeared online. It's early days, so we'll have to leave it to the brain boxes to figure out whether black holes are just some kind of cosmic Cousin It.