How Black Holes Actually Glow: A Simple Discovery ⚡ экспресс
Black holes should radiate, but this has never been observed. By creating an analogue of a black hole's boundary in an optical fiber (a light "funnel"), physicists saw that the radiation arises directly, not through a cascade. This simple mechanism allows a better understanding of how holes lose energy—and perhaps one day this radiation can be detected.
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.