Black Holes Slowly Evaporate Through Hawking Radiation

Black holes are predicted to leak tiny amounts of radiation, slowly losing mass until isolated black holes eventually evaporate.

Astronomy

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Black holes are famous for trapping anything that crosses their event horizon, but modern physics predicts a strange exception outside the horizon: they can slowly release radiation because of quantum effects. This is known as Hawking radiation. The process is expected to be extremely weak for ordinary astrophysical black holes, so it has never been directly detected. As a black hole emits this radiation, it loses energy and therefore mass. If it does not gain enough matter or other energy to offset the loss, it should gradually shrink. The smaller it becomes, the stronger its predicted radiation becomes, so evaporation speeds up as the black hole gets smaller. For black holes with masses comparable to stars, the timescale is extraordinarily long, far beyond the current age of the universe. Much smaller hypothetical black holes would evaporate much faster, potentially ending in a burst of high-energy radiation. The basic prediction remains an important part of theoretical physics, but direct observation of Hawking radiation from an astrophysical black hole has not yet been achieved.

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