LogFAQs > #982232197

Pikachuchupika posted...

Yes lol. I'm not really sure what they are, but apparently they are similar to black holes but don't have singularities. Honestly, it would make sense because hawking radiation escapes black holes eventually causing them to disappear. How is that possible if nothing can escape a black hole? (Maybe there are things that can escape a black hole)

The radiation isn't coming "from" the black hole. It's coming from quantum fluctuations right at the edge of the event horizon.

It's obviously complicated, but to simplify a bit, particles can and do pop into and out of existence all the time at the quantum level. They always appear in pairs, though, and annihilate each other the instant they touch (which is normally immediate, as they appear directly next to each other). However, if this happens right at the edge of the event horizon, it's possible for one of the particles to fall into the black hole before they annihilate each other, leaving the second particle free to continue into space.

There's some strange "negative mass" or something that causes the orphan particle to reduce the mass of the black hole rather than increase it that's a bit beyond my level of comprehension. Like instead of annihilating with the particle it spawned with, it annihilates with one of the particles inside the black hole. I'm not 100% sure on that part. But it's the quantum fluctuations right on the edge of the event horizon that leads to this so-called "Hawking radiation."