Hawking Radiation

black holes · quantum physics · Stephen Hawking

Black holes leak energy. Scientists once thought black holes swallowed everything and never gave anything back. But in 1974, Stephen Hawking discovered that black holes actually release a tiny stream of energy called Hawking radiation. This happens right at the edge of the black hole, called the event horizon.

Quantum magic at work. Hawking radiation comes from strange quantum effects, the weird rules that govern the tiniest things in the universe. Pairs of particles pop into existence just outside a black hole, and sometimes one gets pulled in while the other escapes as radiation.

Too tiny to see. Hawking radiation is so incredibly faint that our best telescopes can't detect it yet. It would take technology far beyond what we have now to actually observe this ghostly energy leaking from a black hole.

Hawking's brilliant idea. Stephen Hawking combined two completely different areas of physics, quantum mechanics and gravity, to make this discovery. Most scientists thought those two worlds never mixed together at such extreme conditions.