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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 degree of disorder. Detecting such [tag:radiation]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.