| Sumario: | This article discusses the physics behind the astronomical phenomena known as "black holes." In the paper that catapulted him to fame in 1974, Stephen Hawking predicted that some black holes should emit radiation. And now, it seems that another famous coinage by Dr Wheeler (John Wheeler)--that "black holes have no hair"--is also false. What Dr Wheeler meant by the hairlessness of black holes was that they could be characterised by just three numbers: mass, angular momentum and electric charge. Once Dr Hawking discovered that a black hole radiates, however, the lack of hair led to a paradox. In a paper just published in Nuclear Physics B, Samir Mathur and his colleagues at Ohio State University seem to have solved the paradox using string theory, which is the best available attempt to reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics.
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