Watch: Three Ways an Astronaut Could Fall Into a Black Hole
Stephen Hawking is shaking up the conversation about how black holes work.
Black holes are shrouded in mystery, with recent research only deepening scientists' understanding of how strange they must be.
The challenge of nailing down the nature of black holes has returned to the news, with renowned physicist Stephen Hawking saying recently that "there are no black holes"—at least not how we've thought of them.
The conventional view of black holes is that they possess a gravitational pull so powerful that nothing is able to escape, not even light. The boundary past which there is supposedly no return is known as the event horizon.
Now Hawking says there are no event horizons after all. That means that stuff—including light—can indeed escape from black holes. More on that in a minute.
First, let's explain the conventional
