Stephen Hawking is already the proud owner of a very comprehensive CV. Being played by Eddie Redmayne in an Oscar-winning portrayal of your life is not a bad start; combine this with ground-breaking science, an inspiring ordeal with motor neurone disease, and cameo performances in the Big Bang Theory and The Simpsons and you’d think there wasn’t much more to add. However the Nobel Prize, indicative of success in science, remains elusive – unless his most recent paper changes that.

The Nobel Prize is traditionally awarded in sciences only when the theory is backed by experimental results; this has been difficult for Hawking whose area of interest is black holes and cosmology. Trying to gather data about these is near impossible, leaving Hawking Nobel-less.

Black Holes sucking in nearby light and matter are a familiar concept: areas of such high gravity that the normal rules of physics stop applying. They are either formed by the collapse of high mass stars or have existed since the Big Bang and vary massively in size. The smallest are as small as an atom but have the same mass as a mountain while the largest have the mass of four million suns, for example the supermassive black hole around which our entire galaxy orbits.

Hawking’s most famous contribution is the proposal that Black Holes are decreasing in mass through the release of Hawking Radiation, and previously this was thought to be his best bet at a Nobel Prize. This describes the release of radiation from a black hole, slowly decreasing its mass over millions of years. This emission of radiation increases as the black hole becomes smaller predicting a burst of energy from low mass black holes.

However, attempts to measure this have so far proved futile. Potentially the Large Hadron Collider could create a tiny black hole in controlled conditions. There were fears that this might gobble up the planet, even eliciting a Hawaiian court case against the European Organization for Nuclear Research. In reality, as Hawking himself explained as a punchline to a joke at a recent talk, “the black hole would disappear in a puff of Hawking radiation – and I would get a Nobel Prize.”

His latest publication, released in brief in 2014, concerns the black hole information paradox, a problem first posed by Hawking in the 1970s. This is a conflict between two big hitting ideas. The first is that on a fundamental scale the laws of physics are reversible, so information at one point in the past can theoretically be recovered. However all this information is guzzled down by the black holes and emitted as a stream of Hawking radiation, in which the information disappears.

Hawking’s answer, in the recently released “Soft Hair on Black Holes” (a paper currently without peer review), is that the information is at least partially stored in the deformities in space-time. These appear as a luscious head of ‘hair’, streams of zero-mass particles surrounding the Black Hole. This paper provides the possibility of a testable hypothesis that could finally earn Hawking a Nobel Prize.

The jury is still out on the likelihood of this. The ‘hairy’ mechanism and a practical way to observe the phenomenon are still very unclear, but don’t underestimate Stephen Hawking. He has often exceeded expectations before.