New astonishing research has been published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics: Hawking Radiation leaking from black holes might be detected.
In 2017 a collision between two neutrons stars occurred. Today, it looks like it still reverberates. The vibration of the collision can become proof of Hawking’s theory. Hawking predicted that quantum particles would slowly leak out of black holes, thus somehow contradicting Einstein’s beliefs.
Einstein’s relativity versus Hawking’s quantum mechanics
A black hole has an event horizon, defined by Einstein as the point of no return. It is the escape limit from where nothing, no matter how fast, can go back: the gravitational power of the black hole will capture it. This is Einstein’s theory.
Hawking contradicted him by saying that something will leak eventually. The spread of particles that would do so would be super low-energy waves emitted by black holes. They are called Hawking radiation. It looks like the process is a sort of an evaporating process. The black holes might evaporate in Hawking’s opinion.
Like any other theory about black holes, Hawking’s theory couldn’t be proved so far. The black matter wasn’t seen, so it might just as well not exist. Black holes were the answer scientists came up because they couldn’t explain everything about how the Universe got where it is now.
Not this time either?
Scientists got excited about the new echo of the collision, but they might still be light-years away from getting answers. If Hawking is right, smaller gravitational wave signals following the main gravitational collision event, similar to repeating echoes, would occur.
The theory fits with the reverberation registered now from the collision back in 2017. The trouble is that the first wave detection gave no evidence of Hawking’s radiation. The lack of sensitivity in measurement instruments to be at fault here, or there might not be any radiation at all. Not this time, anyway.
