![]() We heard about the universe contracting for how many decades? And then we found out that it really is expanding. The universe is not going to decay and evaporate. Why does the future always have to end in some cataclysm? This really isn't one of those disaster movies. If everything is destined to disappear in a flash of cool light, there should be plenty of places to look. To figure out if it's a true prediction of our universe's eventual fate, physicists will need to spot some Hawking radiation being produced around gravitationally dense objects - both around black holes and planets, stars, or neutron stars. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on any misgivings you may have about evaporating), all of this is just speculation awaiting confirmation. This might be enough to eventually collapse all matter into black holes, which could continue to slowly drip out light until they too disappear without a trace. Possibly, as the matter that makes up stars, neutron stars, and planets ages, it will eventually undergo an energy transition into a completely new ultralow energy state. What the researchers' theory means in reality isn't clear. "The particles are already separated there by the tidal forces of the gravitational field." "We show that far beyond a black hole the curvature of space-time plays a big role in creating radiation," second author Walter van Suijlekom, a professor of mathematics at Radboud University, said in the statement. According to their new theory, an event horizon isn't necessary for energy to slowly leak from a massive object in the form of light the object's gravitational field is good enough on its own. Sure enough, by applying the framework of the Schwinger effect to Hawking's theory, the theoretical physicists produced a mathematical model that reproduced Hawking radiation in spaces experiencing a range of gravitational field strengths. Black holes may be swallowing invisible matter that slows the movement of stars James Webb Space Telescope discovers oldest black hole in the universe - a cosmic monster 10 million times heavier than the sun A rare type of black hole never proven to exist could be orbiting our galaxy right now, Hubble telescope reveals If the particles then escape the black hole, this energy theft led Hawking to conclude that - over a vast timescale much longer than the current age of the universe - black holes would eventually lose all of their energy and disappear completely.īut if a gravitational field is all that's needed to produce quantum fluctuations and photons, what's stopping any object with a space-time warping mass from creating Hawking radiation? Does Hawking radiation need the special condition of a black hole's event horizon, or can it be produced anywhere in space? To probe these questions, the authors of the new study analyzed Hawking radiation through the lens of a long-predicted process called the Schwinger effect, in which matter can theoretically be generated from the powerful distortions caused by an electromagnetic field. These energy mismatches make photons appear in the contorted space around black holes, siphoning energy from the black hole's field so they can burst into existence. Gravity, according to Einstein's theory of general relativity, distorts space-time, so that quantum fields get more warped the closer they get to the immense gravitational tug of a black hole's singularity.īecause of the uncertainty and weirdness of quantum mechanics, Hawking said this warping creates uneven pockets of differently moving time and subsequent spikes of energy across the field. ![]() In a landmark paper published in 1974, Hawking famously predicted that the extreme gravitational force felt at the mouths of black holes - their event horizons - would summon photons into existence in this way. Space is instead teeming with tiny vibrations that, if imbued with enough energy, randomly burst into virtual particles, producing very-low-energy packets of light, or photons. Space-time monstersĪccording to quantum field theory, there is no such thing as an empty vacuum. ![]() The researchers published their findings June 2 in the journal Physical Review Letters.
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