Hawking radiation

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Hawking radiation

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Both the other commenters explain Hawking Radiation as virtual particles falling into the event horizon, which is weird because that’s not actually what’s going on. What happens is that the existence of the event horizon cuts off certain vibrational nodes in the quantum fields of some particles, which allows energy to leak out of the black hole. Think of a quantum field as an infintely large drumskin, and think of particles as specifc arrangements of waves traveling across the membrane. A black hole is roughly analogous to cutting a hole in the membrane, and Hawking showed that doing so changes the resonant properties of the entire drumskin. We observe that the field around the black hole must be “excited” to a specific energy level, and that energy comes from the black hole. This looks an awful lot like heat emission, and we see that excited quantum field as the spontaneous generation of particles that we call Hawking Radiation.

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