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Black hole mystery: Researchers want to track down Hawking's prediction

2022-11-27T14:21:34.506Z


Black hole mystery: Researchers want to track down Hawking's prediction Created: 11/27/2022, 2:05 p.m By: Tanya Banner Stephen Hawking was considered a brilliant physicist. In 2018, the Briton, who suffered from ALS, a degenerative disease of the motor nervous system, died. (Archive image) © Matt Dunham/dpa Stephen Hawking is considered a genius. Now a research team wants to test a prediction


Black hole mystery: Researchers want to track down Hawking's prediction

Created: 11/27/2022, 2:05 p.m

By: Tanya Banner

Stephen Hawking was considered a brilliant physicist.

In 2018, the Briton, who suffered from ALS, a degenerative disease of the motor nervous system, died.

(Archive image) © Matt Dunham/dpa

Stephen Hawking is considered a genius.

Now a research team wants to test a prediction by the British physicist in the laboratory.

Amsterdam – The British physicist Stephen Hawking is considered to be a genius. Throughout his life he has, among other things, dealt with the phenomenon of black holes.

As early as 1975, the physicist – derived from the quantum field theory and the general theory of relativity – predicted that black holes emit radiation.

This radiation was named after him and is known as Hawking radiation.

So far it has neither been observed nor proven, but now a research team is setting out to test the prediction of Stephen Hawking, who died in 2018, in the laboratory.

To understand what it's all about, you first need to know what a black hole is: it's an object with unimaginable gravity - it attracts everything.

Matter once crossing the so-called "event horizon" never comes out.

Because this also applies to light, black holes are virtually "invisible" and therefore very difficult to study.

Stephen Hawking predicted black hole phenomenon

In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking realized that certain quantum effects at the event horizon must be causing the black hole to radiate - Hawking radiation.

Specifically, the predicted phenomenon has to do with quantum particles that often appear in pairs - a so-called quantum entanglement.

Hawking wondered what would happen if one of the two particles fell over the event horizon into the black hole, but its companion didn't.

According to the British physicist, the particle that stays outside the black hole should radiate measurable heat.

Hawking also predicted at the time that the radiation must be inversely proportional to the size of the black hole.

This means: microscopically small black holes would shine very brightly, while larger black holes should shine only weakly.

Researchers want to simulate Hawking radiation in the laboratory

Hawking's theories have not yet been proven, because black holes are too far away to detect the weak radiation.

But a team of researchers led by physicist Lotte Mertens from the University of Amsterdam is working on a way to simulate radiation on Earth.

Together with researchers from the Leibnitz Institute in Dresden, Mertens is working on practical proof in the laboratory.

The physicists have developed a model with which they want to simulate the effect predicted by Hawking in the laboratory, as reported by the

MDR

.

If the experiment succeeds, it could fill the gap between Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity and the principles of quantum physics.

(tab)

A few years ago, researchers led by Stephen Hawking started thinking about how the world could end.

Source: merkur

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