how does hawking radiation work?
In: Physics
So in Quantum Field Theory, there is a concept of things called “virtual particles”. These virtual particles form in matter and antimatter pairs, on such short time scales that they are definitionally unobservable, otherwise they wouldn’t be virtual.
At the edge of a black hole, some weird physics happens, and these virtual pairs can be split apart, where one falls into the black hole, and the other flies away in the form of a real particle. Except, we have to conserve energy when we have real particles, so it has to have drawn energy from somewhere, which ends up being the mass of the black hole.
Of course this is horrifically oversimplified, and I only have a marginally better understanding, but this is a decent start.
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