Hawking radiation and how it causes black holes to evaporate
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Black holes are so heavy that the gravity they create prevents anything close to them from ever escaping. The border between escape/no escape is called the “event horizon” by scientists. Anything inside the event horizon will be sucked into the black hole, while things outside the event horizon can potentially escape.
New particles are often popping into existence in pairs, a particle and its anti-particle. Usually these particles don’t last very long, they are created then collide with their anti-particle and disappear again. Hawking theorized that if a particle pair appeared exactly on the event horizon, one particle might go into the event horizon, and the other leave it. This prevents the particle pair from self-annihilating, and leaves the one particle outside of the event horizon. This spare particle is Hawking radiation.
Hawking radiation causes black holes to evaporate because energy/matter must be conserved. When these particle pairs normally pop into existence, they are created from zero mass, then self-annihilate to have zero mass again. Since Hawking radiation can’t do this and allows some of the particles (which have energy/mass) to escape, this mass must be taken away from the black hole in order to balance the books on conservation of mass/energy.
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