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Shortly before Stephen Hawking's death in March, the legendary cosmologist continued to think big.
The last article to which he contributed, entitled "Black Hole Entropy and Soft Hair", concerns what theoretical physicists call the paradox of information: what happens when an object falls into a black hole?
A few days before Hawking's death, co-authors Malcolm J. Perry, Sasha Haco and Andrew Strominger were working on paper. Perry called Hawking to keep him informed, unaware of how sick he was. It was perhaps the last scientific exchange Hawking had had. "It was very difficult for Stephen to communicate and I was put on a speaker to explain where we had arrived. When I explained it, he simply made a huge smile. I told him we had something. He knew the end result, "said Perry The Guardian.
Physicists show in their paper that entropy of the black hole can be recorded by the photons surrounding the horizon of black hole events, at which point light can not escape intense gravitational attraction. They call this burst of photons "soft hair". You can see the paper by yourself here.
Hawking's research has played a key role in our current understanding of black holes. His book A brief history of time brought cosmology to a general public in 1988 and became an international bestseller.
Hawking spoke with a computer-generated voice for decades after losing his voice to Lou Gehrig's disease, a neuromuscular disorder also known as ALS. He was diagnosed as a 21-year-old graduate student in 1963 and doctors gave him less than three years to live. At his death, at the age of 76, he was buried at Westminster Abbey, in London, between the remains of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin.
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