An international team of physicists from the US, UK, and Italy, have co-authored two papers that finally resolve a problem confounding scientists for nearly half a century.

With new calculations they have demonstrated that black holes have a gravitational field at the quantum level which encodes information about how they were formed. It is the missing key to Stephen Hawking’s paradox when he suggested there was no remnant of their past.

“It turns out that black holes are in fact good children, holding onto the memory of the stars that gave birth to them,” said Xavier Calmet, professor of theoretical physics at the University of Sussex.