If Hawking radiation were to be true, how can black holes lose mass if not even light can escape it?
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Under the model that permits Hawking Radiation, empty space isn’t really empty.
Pairs of particles and anti-particles are occasionally produced out of “nothing” thanks to quantum weirdness, and then almost-immediately annihilate each other. The net effect on the rest of the universe is thus, usually, nothing.
Now imagine that this happens *riiiight* next to the event horizon of a black hole. If one member of the pair is trapped behind the event horizon and the other member isn’t, they can’t immediately annihilate each other like they normally would. Instead, the one that *isn’t* trapped has managed to graduate to “real” existence – and, because There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, the black hole’s mass decreases by the same amount.
It doesn’t *technically* take anything from *beyond* the event horizon, but the net result is the same *as though* it had.
Pairs of virtual photons are being created all the time. If one of those photons happens to appear outside the event horizon, it escapes from the black hole a a very tiny amount of mass is lost.
In empty space it is permitted that particle pairs can appear out of no where. This pair consists of a particle of matter and a particle of antimatter that very quickly recombine and annihilate each other (thus preserving conservation of mass).
If this happens very near the event horizon of a black hole the matter particle might possibly escape while the antimatter particle falls into the black hole. Since the black hole is made of matter, the anti-matter particle annihilates part of it, reducing its mass.
Lol this is a hell of a question to try to eli5. I am sure someone else will explain it better than I will, but hawking radiation does not happen on the inside of the event horizon. Anything outside the event horizon can escape the gravitational pull and hawking radiation happens at the outside edge.
They have found that in a vacuum particles and anti-particles can appear for fractions of a second. Normally they appear and then crash back into each other destroying each other, preserving the conservation of energy. At the edge of a black hole though sometimes one of the particles ventures in past the event horizon and gets sucked in, while the other takes energy from the black hole and gets shot out into space at close to the speed of light. These ejected particles and stolen energy That is lost to outer space is what we call hawking radiation.
Hopefully someone with better knowledge of the subject can explain it better or more accurately
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