A black hole is like an ember that was thought to smolder forever, but eventually must go out — evaporating without a trace. That was the prediction of Stephen Hawking: quantum processes at the event horizon (the boundary beyond which even light cannot escape) produce a faint glow, and the hole slowly loses mass. But a new study revisits this scenario, adding quantum corrections from anomalies and vacuum polarization — effects that become noticeable at the smallest scales.
It turns out that a black hole doesn't just slim down uniformly. Its temperature first rises, like an oven heating up, but at some point it peaks and then starts to fall. Hawking radiation weakens and eventually stalls. The hole doesn't vanish; instead, it becomes an "extremal remnant"—a cold object with zero temperature, like an ember that stops glowing but doesn't crumble to ash.
These results were also verified using the tunneling method: particles escaping from beneath the horizon obey the same rules as in the refined thermodynamics. Thus, quantum corrections paint a new fate for black holes — not complete evaporation, but a quiet halt as a stable remnant.
If a black hole with the mass of the Sun evaporated via Hawking radiation without corrections, it would take $10^{67}$ years — billions upon billions of times longer than the age of the universe. With the new corrections, the process could stop even earlier.