Can black holes evaporate?

Shady Abdel Hafez

Black holes are known to have an enormous magnetizing force that can attract anything into them so they can never get out, including light, but as long as nothing comes out of it, can they shrink so much that they disappear? This is what scientists are trying to prove.

To understand the problem related to this question we can start from how the black hole, and start from a giant star that exceeds the mass of the sun more than eight times, these stars stand stable between the two opposing forces, the first is the weight of the star itself and pressure on the center, and the second is the forces resulting from the merger The nucleus in the center of this star, the ones that push against pressure on the center prevents the star from collapsing.

The star lasts for the rest of its life between these two forces, but hydrogen star fuel is depleted at some point, causing the star to lose its balance and the forces of pressure on the forces of nuclear fusion. The star collapses on itself at the moment of an explosion called supernova. Three, which either turn the star after the explosion to a white dwarf or neutron star or black hole.

In the case of the latter scenario, scientists believe that due to the mass of the super star, this collapse can never stop. The star material gradually shrinks to a pointless size called singularity, and its presence is not yet scientifically confirmed because of what it poses. Catastrophic theoretical problems that question the fate of this compressed material.

But what we are sure of is that what happens in the center of the black holes reduces the size of the star very extreme with the survival of mass, it is like to shrink the size of the whole globe to the size of the fruit of lemon with the mass remains as it is.

This increases the ability of the black hole to attract, so that it can pull anything no matter how fast it is, even the light itself is the fastest thing in the universe can not escape it, for this reason we can not see what happens inside the black holes if it happened and we were within walking distance of them They do not radiate anything.

Even the light - which makes us see things - once it reaches the limits of the area around the black hole called the "horizon of the event" can not return again, the black holes then is a highway but only one way to the hole.

For this reason, the scientific world believed that a celestial body that radiates nothing but attracts things can not lose any mass, and therefore can not be destroyed. That belief remained constant in the research medium until the British physicist Stephen Hawking faced a dilemma in the 1970s At first, he thought it was a mathematical imbalance in his mathematical work: the black hole emitted particles in the form of radiation.

Hawking radiation
To understand this, we note that the researchers discovered that the vacuum is a sea of ​​bizarre particles that are generated in the form of pairs (positive and negative) and then annihilate each other at a very short time. But the Hawking problem emerged when we approached the black hole, That point that juxtaposes the event horizon completely.

Here, Hawking says, anywhere in the universe, contrasting particles will be created and destroyed before we even know it, but the horizon of the event can not escape anything small or fast, so when the particles of space are created on the black hole, But one enters the black hole and the other begins in space.

When this happens, and for the laws of physics to remain, the particles entering the black hole diminish its mass, thus slowly shrinking until it completely evaporates. The particles that go outward produce what we now know as "Hawking radiation."

Happy Hawking idea
Hawking's idea was revolutionary, and although it answered many of the problems faced by theoretical physicists at the time, it opened the door to other problems that still remain the center of modern cosmology.

However, we have not yet been able to detect Hawking radiation, not because it does not exist, but because it is inversely proportional to the mass of the black hole, which means that the giant black holes will evaporate so slowly that their radiation can not be observed.

In recent years before his death, Hawking predicted that experiments of high energies in particle collisions such as the large Hadroni collider in Switzerland could help him test his theory by detecting micro-sized black holes evaporating in a very short time, but their impact could be monitored.

Recently, scientists have discovered that the "horizon of the event" is not only the end of the black hole, but also a more general physical concept that can apply to certain phenomena that have been trapped in very harsh conditions.

Larger than just radiation
For example, in a study published in the journal Nature only several years ago, researchers were able to use sound waves to find a phenomenon equivalent to a black hole by releasing it in a cloud of rubidium at extreme cold temperatures (-273 C).

At this temperature, the sound waves can not run faster than half a millimeter per second. Here, researchers through a laser beam push the rhubidium atoms faster than that speed, causing a sharp disturbance of sound waves in the vacuum surrounding the rubidium atoms, the event.

At that point, bursts of compressed and equal sound waves from the rubidium-like space are attracted to one another and the other to the vacuum, those waves mimicking Hawking radiation.

In a study published only a few days ago in the famous journal Visex Review Lets, a group of researchers could simulate Hawking's radiation in a similar way by pushing two different sets of color from rapid laser beams through fiber optic.

When the two groups overlap, this causes the "refractive index" of that wavelength to change, which in turn drives some radiation out and the inside to simulate the Hawking radiation.

This type of experiment attempts to prove that "Hawking radiation" and "event horizon" are concepts not only related to black holes but phenomena that occur when a physical entity is confined to stress conditions such as those that occur on the horizon of the black hole.

But this unfortunately can not fully confirm Hawking's radiation. More research and innovation are needed to make sure of Hawking's most revolutionary hypothesis that black holes are the most powerful things in the universe and the most terrifying ones evaporate like a piece of snow.