Mighty Big

Hawking’s famous Black Hole Information Paradox has stumped physicists for over half a century, but it relied on the idea that black holes are 'bald'. In other words, a black hole does not carry any details about the material that made it beyond its mass, charge, and spin. Recent research by Hawking and others, however, has found that black holes actually sport infinitely dense heads of hair. In fact, whenever an object falls into a black hole, a faint imprint of the object ends up irrevocably laced into the fabric of space and time surrounding the black hole.

Around a century ago, Edwin Hubble made one of the most important discoveries in astronomical history: the Universe is expanding. Ever since Hubble, understanding exactly how fast the Universe is growing has been one of the most important tasks in cosmology. Today, astronomers are faced with a puzzle: why is the expansion of the Universe speeding up? Attempting to answer this question will force scientists to question the most fundamental assumptions in all of physics, and might take us beyond the edge of the Universe itself.