With the recent passing of Stephen Hawking, the community has been revisiting some of his most important contributions to the field of theoretical physics and astrophysics. Nature celebrates Hawking's career with an online collection.

In 1974, publishing in Nature, Stephen Hawking showed that a black hole can lose mass through the radiation of particles. A quantum effect in essence, the now known as Hawking-Bekenstein radiation shifted the paradigm of black holes as sinks from which nothing can escape.