Physicists have been puzzling over black holes for decades now, and while standard theories hold that the mysterious objects are "bald," new research suggests thatblack holes actually have "hair."
Not the stuff that grows on your head, but detailed features that reveal the type of matter that fell into the black hole in the first place -- and that help scientists tell black holes apart.
Dr. John Wheeler, the physicist who coined the term "black hole," suggested that all it takes to define one is mass, angular momentum (how fast they spin) and electrical charge -- and that there are no other distinguishing physical features, or "hair." Then New Zealand mathematician Dr. Roy Kerr used Einstein's equationsto describe this model mathematically.
But an international team of scientists came to a new conclusion when they used different theories of gravity -- called "scalar-tensor theories" -- to carry out a series of calculations on the theoretical structure of black holes.
"We used some techniques that allowed us to study the structures of black holes in these theories and we found that these black holes develop scalar hair when they are surrounded by ordinary matter," Dr. Thomas Sotiriou, a physicist at the International School for Advanced Studies in Italy, told The Huffington Post in an email. "This does not happen in the standard picture. "