How do black holes die?
In: Planetary Science
They will eventually dissipate due to Hawking radiation, a very slow form of radiation associated with quantum tunnnelling that allows for particles to escape the event horizon of a black hole. This process takes an immense amount of time, but it will eventually lead to the disapation of the black hole (assuming no additional mass is added).
Edit: for more detailed explanation
There is a thing called hawking radiation basically some stuff does escape a black hole (not a significant amount ) which over the course of billions of years makes the black hole lose mass and eventually die
Follow-up: If black holes are so strong that not even light (radiation) can escape, how can Hawking radiation escape? Wouldn’t it just be pulled right back in?
Follow up question: after Hawking radiation reduces a black hole’s mass to less gravity required to maintain a singularity, wouldn’t it explode violently?
Short answer – rather slowly.
‘Empty’ space is actually full of stuff – pairs of one particle and one anti-particle are constantly appearing everywhere. Normally they annihilate each other more or less instantly, and we don’t notice them.
But if they appear _just_ the right distance from a black hole, one will fall in allowing the other to escape. (These escaping particles are called Hawking Radiation.) Because the universe needs to conserve energy, the positive energy carried by the escaping particle is balanced off with a reduction in energy inside the black hole.
Because energy and mass are fundamentally the same thing, this means a reduction in mass for the black hole. If nothing else is falling in from outside, the mass will eventually reach zero through this ‘evaporation’ process, and the black hole is no more.
Emphasis on ‘eventually’. A black hole the mass of our sun would take something like 10^67 years to evaporate in this way, which is many, many orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe.
Everyone on here saying it takes billions or trillions of years for a black hole to evaporate.
That’s all wrong.
Estimates are 10 to the 67 years.
Or for SMBs 10 to the 100 years
That’s a Gogol years.
A trillion years would feel like a blip on the radar in comparison.
We know from Einstein’s E = mc^2 that mass is a form of energy.
A weird (even by QM standards) part of Quantum Mechanics is the appearance and disappearance of virtual particles; these have mass.
If one particle appears either side of the event horizon of the black hole then its mass will decrease over time (this happens really slowly at first then speeds up as the black hole gets smaller.
Although I know how in theory I’m so curious to know if there is any object in space that we know of that is evidence of a black hole dying, or does that process take so long that it hasn’t happened yet in our universe.
How interesting it would be to see a black hole lose its status as a black hole and what would that object be? Would it revert back to a star or would it be something else entirely?
not a physicist but my basic understanding of hawking radiation is that sometimes a pair a particles will basically spawn on the edge of the black hole, one matter one antimatter, and the antimatter one falls into the blackhole, and the matter one flies out. This is almost purely theoretical and its possible black holes are just a dead end for matter, but not much is known about them. particle physics math and black hole math dont work well together because the standard model of particle physics doesn’t even include gravity because gravity isn’t a real force and theres no graviton particle.
Kind of like a puddle. The puddle never gets to the boiling point of water as a whole, but every once in a while some molecules do and escape/evaporate. It’s different for a black hole, molecules don’t heat up and escape, its more they pop into being right on the edge and 1 of the 2 leaves the black hole, but for EL15 i like the puddle
And this is just a theory, we don’t have the knowledge yet to know for sure
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