Of course you have! What would we do without them? They solve the Hawking Paradox.
(You already know what that is, so you don’t need to read the explanation here.)
Black holes, of course, “are dead stars that have collapsed and have such strong gravity that not even light can escape.” (Do we really need BBC News to explain this here?)
And, as Hawking pointed out, “black holes behave in a way that puts two fundamental theories at odds with each other,”i.e., Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which says information that goes into a black hole can’t come out, and quantum mechanics, which complains that’s impossible. This “deeply troubled physicists,” who dislike contradictions.
In particular, “The paradox raised the possibility that either quantum mechanics or general relativity might be flawed, which is a terrifying prospect for theoretical physicists because they are the twin pillars on which most of our understanding of the Universe rests.”
Should I mention that the part of physics that terrifies everyone else is nuclear weapons? For scientists, a bad day is a contradiction; for everyone else, a bad day is a mushroom cloud dripping radioactive fallout.
Fortunately for theoretical physicists, it now appears someone has solved the black hole problem. It’s elegantly simple: “The constituents of the star leave an imprint in the black hole’s gravitational field.” It’s called “quantum hair” because it supersedes what’s called the “no hair theorem.”
Black holes are no longer bald, they grow hair!
I hope you’re paying attention to this, because it’s important! If it works, “The ‘yes hair theorem’ [will] resolve the paradox by bridging the gap between general relativity and quantum mechanics … [because] quantum hair allows information about what goes into a black hole to come out again without violating any of the important principles of either theory.”
That’s the good news. In fact, it’s great news! The bad news? This sucker is, you guessed it, a bomb (see article here).
