yukiine
Above me, you stated that nothing can escape.
False. We have witnessed photons and EM rays being emitted from a black hole, which is thought to be causing them to die.
False. We have witnessed photons and EM rays being emitted from a black hole, which is thought to be causing them to die.
Ah, Hawking radiation, my old friend. While it appears to be coming from the black hole, the truth is much funnier: It comes from NOTHING!!! To paraphrase A Brief History of Time:
The Uncertainty Principle states that no field can have either its current value or rate of change known exactly, and thus we can't assume a priori that the values of any field at any point in space, including those surrounding a black hole's event horizon, are zero. This uncertainty manifests itself with the creation of "virtual particle pairs," either of matter or energy, which ordinarily annihilate each other shortly after their creation. Because energy can't come from nothing, one of the pair must exhibit negative energy to balance the positive energy of its partner. Free particles, however, can't really have negative energy, so under most circumstances annihilation must come quickly. Near a black hole, though, the gravity may lock onto even a real particle such that it would take energy to make it escape, thus endowing it with negative energy. If a virtual particle pair is created on the periphery of a black hole, the negative member may be pulled in and, because it may then realistically have negative energy and because it would no longer annihilate with its partner, becomes real, eventually becoming a part of the black hole and decreasing its energy by an amount equal to the positive energy of the partner on the outside that escapes.
In other words, nothing actually emerges from the event horizon. And don't ask me to explain it further, because I'm not Stephen Hawking.
