Black holes are not as black as we once thought. They are theorized to die a slow death by evaporation, emitting energy known as Hawking radiation. But the mechanism for evaporation is not well understood. Then again, no one has ever even directly detected a black hole.
Last August, Stephen Hawking tantalised the world by saying he'd worked out a solution to the “black hole paradox”. He's now dropped the first detailed discussion of his hypothesis for the world to pore over, here at ArXiv in a paper entitled Soft hair on black holes.
