There's a lot we still don't know about black holes, but these light-gobbling behemoths would be even more mysterious if Stephen Hawking hadn't plumbed their inky depths.
For starters, the famed cosmologist, who died yesterday (March 14) at the age of 76, helped give more solid mathematical backing to the concept of black holes, the existence of which was predicted by Albert Einstein's 1915 theory of general relativity.
Image: An artist’s illustration of a supermassive black hole ever discovered. Credit: Robin Dienel, courtesy of the Carnegie Institution for Science
