* Astronomy

In physics, Hawking's biggest contribution has come in explaining black holes, where he showed these collapsed stars, with gravity so strong that even light cannot escape from them, do radiate heat. "Hawking radiation" explained why microscopic black holes formed in high speed cosmic ray collisions aren't much of a worry, they radiate their heat away quickly and dissolve. Something similar may have happened to black holes formed in the early pressure cooker of the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago. Supermassive black holes, such as Saggitarius A*, located at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, radiate their heat very slowly, meaning such objects will linger in the cosmos long after the light from the smallest star has burned out, trillions of years from now.

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Acclaimed physicist Stephen Hawking recorded a special lecture for the ASU Origins Symposium April 6.
The Origins Symposium inaugurates the new Origins Initiative at ASU.
Hawking, recorded the lecture as he was not able to attend due to illness. Hawking is Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge and is widely considered to be one of the greatest theoretical physicists since Newton and Einstein.

Cambridge University physicist Stephen Hawking, one of the world's best-known scientists, has been rushed by ambulance to hospital, where he is reportedly "very ill."

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