How do black holes die?
In: Planetary Science
ELI5 for this question is hard because there are a number of ways to abstract the concept of hawking radiation, but reduce the accuracy. The top answer right now says quantum tunneling, and this isn’t just a hand wavey answer but a wrong one.
One of the ways in which Stephen Hawking first suggested to simplify it is this:
When a particle collides with its antiparticle it annhilates and gives off energy.
Empty space isn’t actually empty and has virtual particles coming in and out of existence in particle-antiparticle pairs, which will quickly collide with each other and “annihilate”.
When this happens on or near the event horizon, one particle can become trapped in the black hole and the other escapes – the energy has to come from somewhere, so it must come from the black hole. This is probably the best ELI5 answer you can get for this question.
There are a few problems with this explanation though, like are virtual particles even really real? They’re used in a bunch of calculations to simplify them, but that’s an ongoing argument in physics that’s too complicated for ELI5.
As others have said, they essentially wither away due to a phenomenon known as Hawking radiation, which means they slowly release light particles continuously until there’s nothing left.
At the quantum level, there are teeny tiny fluctuations in energy happening all the time, kind of like foam. Energy, mass, and particles are all kind of fuzzy at this scale, but sometimes these fluctuations in energy spike and two particles are created spontaneously. Unfortunately for the newly born particles, they come in matter/antimatter pairs and proptly smash together almost the instant they’re created and annihilate themselves.
HOWEVER
If, by pure chance, this event were to occur **precisely** on the event horizon, one member of the pair would be ejected, and the other, created inside the event horizon, would never leave. You can imagine that, given infinite time, even the smallest probability events occur an infinite number of times. Imagine putting 100 billion suns worth of matter through a drinking straw. It’s not impossible, the question is only how long it will take.
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