Stephen Hawking was right about black holes 'evaporating,' new study shows

In 1974, Stephen Hawking made one of his most famous predictions: that black holes eventually evaporate entirely.

According to Hawking’s theory, black holes are not perfectly “black” but instead actually emit particles. This radiation, Hawking believed, could eventually siphon enough energy and mass away from black holes to make them disappear. The theory is widely assumed to be true but was once thought nearly impossible to prove.

For the first time, however, physicists have shown this elusive Hawking radiation — at least in a lab. Though Hawking radiation is too faint to be detected in space by our current instruments, physicists have now seen this radiation in a black hole analog created using sound waves and some of the coldest, strangest matter in the universe. [9 Ideas About Black Holes That Will Blow Your Mind]

Pairs of particles

Black holes exert such an incredibly powerful gravitational force that even a photon, which travels at the speed of light, could not escape. While the vacuum of space is generally thought of as empty, the uncertainty of quantum mechanics dictates that a vacuum is instead teeming with virtual particles that flit in and out of existence in matter-antimatter pairs. (Antimatter particles have the same mass as their matter counterparts, but opposite electrical charge.)

Normally, after a pair of virtual particles appears, they immediately annihilate each other. Next to a black hole, however, the extreme forces of gravity instead pull the particles apart, with one particle absorbed by the black hole as the other shoots off into space. The absorbed particle has negative energy, which reduces the black hole’s energy and mass. Swallow enough of these virtual particles, and the black hole eventually evaporates. The escaping particle becomes known as Hawking radiation.

source: nbcnews.com