How Black Holes Actually Glow: A Simple Discovery ⚡ экспресс
Hawking radiation, predicted for black holes, links gravity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics, but has never been observed astronomically—the odds are vanishingly small, and it is studied in laboratory analogues. The source of the radiation's energy should be the gravitational field, but the mechanism of quantum generation remained unknown. Experiments in a fiber-optic analogue of an event horizon showed that, contrary to previous ideas of a complex cascade process, quantum birth occurs in a simple direct way. For the first time, the backreaction of the radiation on the field was measured. The result suggests the existence of an equally direct mechanism for other lab analogues and possibly for real gravitational fields, clarifying how black holes may radiate.
A black hole is not just a vacuum cleaner. It glows faintly, emitting particles — this idea was proposed by Jacob Bekenstein, who connected the hole's temperature to its [tag:entropy]degree of disorder. Detecting such radiation in space is incredibly difficult.
Physicists set up a simple experiment: they fired a laser pulse through a glass fiber so fast that for light a "point of no return" appeared — like in a river with a current stronger than any swimmer. And they waited for "splashes" — quantum bursts, resembling a single splash from a stone in the rapids, not an avalanche. The previous explanation painted a tangled cascade, but nature turned out simpler.
But the main surprise is how ghostly this "simplicity" is. If a black hole weighed as much as the Sun, evaporation in such splashes would take longer than the age of the Universe multiplied by billions of billions. The light is there, but almost none of it. Perhaps someday, by catching particles from real holes, we will resolve the paradox of missing information.
🎯 If a black hole had the mass of the Sun, it would take it billions of billions of times longer than the age of the Universe to completely evaporate.