Hawking radiation
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Hawking radiation is what happens when general relativity (gravity) and quantum mechanics (really small things) run headlong into each other. It’s a way for a black hole to emit radiation even though our conventional understanding is that nothing can come out of the black hole. And, strictly speaking, it’s not, but that’s where quantum weirdness comes in.
Quantum mechanics suggests, among other things, that at very small scales (very short distances, very short times) pairs of particles and anti-particles can arbitrarily pop in and out of existence. This happens so close together and for such short periods of time that, at our macroscale, we never notice. But if it happens that if the pair pops into being right on top of the event horizon of a black hole (which isn’t a physical thing, just a mathmatically defined boundary in space), one half of the pair can be inside the event horizon and one half can be outside.
The one on the inside gets sucked in. The one on the *outside* has no opposite member to mutually annihilate with and promptly goes zipping off at lightspeed…tah dah, radiation.
From an energy and mass balance point of view it makes it look like the black is emitting radiation and “evaporating” (losing mass). Nothing is actually escaping the hole though. The way the math works out, this happens much faster with very small black holes and suggests that tiny black holes, if they exist, have very short lives.
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