

The other would escape and be in principle visible to an outside observer. “Looking at a specific pair of particles, he could show that one of the two when produced at the event horizon would fall into the black hole never to be seen again. “Hawking investigated quantum effects close to the horizon of black holes realizing that pairs of particles would be spontaneously generated here,” Calmet tells Popular Mechanics. Take a Look at the Milky Way’s Black Hole.Hsu detail the problem of the Hawking paradox and potential solutions to this cosmological problem. In it, University of Sussex physics researchers Xavier Calmet and Stephen D. We may finally be on the verge of a solution thanks to review published in the journal Europhysics Letters last month. A paradox was born that physicists have been working for 50 years to solve. This incompatibility , which mainly arises from the lack of a theory of “quantum gravity,” was compounded in the mid-1970s when Hawking took the principles of quantum physics and applied them to the edge of black holes. Yet, they remain frustratingly incompatible. The two theories have been confirmed repeatedly since their distinct inceptions at the start of the 20th century.

This radiation , later called “Hawking radiation,” inadvertently causes a problem at the intersection of general relativity and quantum physics - the former being the best description we have of gravity and the universe on cosmically massive scales, while the latter is the most robust model of the physics that governs the very small. In what is arguably his most significant contribution to science, Stephen Hawking suggested that black holes can leak a form of radiation that causes them to gradually ebb away, and eventually end their lives in a massive explosive event.
