One of the most profound messages Stephen Hawking left to humanity is that nothing lasts forever, and scientists may finally be ready to prove it.
This idea was conveyed in arguably Hawking’s most important work: the hypothesis that black holes “leak” thermal radiation, evaporating in the process and ending their existence in a final explosion. This radiation would eventually become known as “Hawking radiation” in memory of the great scientist. But to date, this is a concept that remains unnoticed and completely hypothetical. But now some scientists think they may have finally found a way to change that; Perhaps we will soon be on the path to proving that Hawking radiation is real.
The team suggests that if larger black holes catastrophically collide and merge, small, hot “bite” black holes could be ejected into space, which could be the key.
More importantly, Hawking said that the smaller the black hole, the faster it would leak Hawking radiation. Thus, supermassive black holes with masses millions or billions of times greater than that of the Sun would theoretically take longer than the estimated lifetime of the cosmos to fully “penetrate”. In other words, how can we detect such long-term leakage? Maybe we can’t, but when it comes to these asteroid-mass black hole morsels called “Bocconcini di Buchi Neri” in Italian, we might be in luck.
Small black holes like this can evaporate and explode on a timescale that humans can actually observe. Additionally, the team says that the end of the life of these black holes should be marked by a characteristic signal indicating that they are quenching and dying through the leakage of Hawking radiation.
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Francesco Sannino: “Hawking predicted that black holes evaporate by emitting particles.”, The scientist behind this proposal and a theoretical physicist from the University of Southern Denmark told Space.com. “We set out to study this and the observational impact of the production of many black hole morsels, or ‘Bocconcini di Buchi Neri,’ which we imagine to be formed during a catastrophic event such as the merger of two astrophysical black holes.”
Morsel black holes can’t keep their cool
The origin of Hawking radiation lies in Stephen Hawking’s 1974 article “Black hole explosions?” It extends to a letter titled: It was published in Nature. The letter arose when Hawking was considering the implications of quantum physics for the formalism of black holes arising from Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. This was interesting because quantum theory and general relativity are two theories that resist unification even today.
Hawking radiation remained troubling and undetected for 50 years for two possible reasons; First, most black holes may not emit this thermal radiation at all, and second, if they do, it may not be detected. Also, black holes in general are very strange objects to begin with and are therefore complicated to study.
“The mind-blowing thing is that the temperature of black holes is inversely proportional to their mass. This means that the more massive they are, the colder they are, and the less massive they are, the hotter they are,” Sannino said.
Even in the emptiest regions of space you’ll find temperatures around minus 454 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 270 degrees Celsius). This is due to a uniform field of radiation left over just after the Big Bang, called the “cosmic microwave background” or “CMB.” This area is often referred to as a “cosmic fossil” because it is so old. Additionally, according to the second law of thermodynamics, heat should not flow from a colder object to a hotter object.
“Black holes heavier than a few solar masses are stable because they are cooler than the CMB,” Sannino said. “Therefore, only smaller black holes are expected to emit potentially observable Hawking radiation.”
Study author Giacomo Cacciapaglia of the French National Center for Scientific Research told Space.com that since the vast majority of black holes in today’s universe are of astrophysical origin and have masses exceeding several times that of the Sun, they cannot emit observable Hawking radiation. .
“Only black holes lighter than the Moon can emit Hawking radiation. We propose that such a black hole could be produced and ejected during a black hole merger and could start emitting immediately after formation,” Cacciapaglia said. he added. “A large number of black hole morsels will be produced near a black hole merger.”
But these black holes are too small to create effects that allow them to be imaged directly, as the Event Horizon Telescope does for supermassive black holes by focusing on the bright material surrounding them.
The team suggests that there is a unique signature that could be used to indicate the presence of these bite-size black holes. This would take the form of a powerful burst of high-energy radiation, called a gamma-ray burst, occurring in the same region of the sky where the black hole merger was detected.
Bocconcini di Buchi Neri black holes will emit Hawking radiation increasingly faster as they lose mass, hastening their explosive demise, researchers said. Those with a mass of around 20,000 tonnes would take an estimated 16 years to evaporate, while lumpy black hole samples with a mass of at least 100,000 kilotons could potentially last as long as hundreds of years.
The evaporation and destruction of the morsels will produce photons exceeding the trillion electron volt (TeV) energy range. To get an idea of how energetic this is, Sannino said CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe, the largest particle accelerator on the planet, smashes protons head-on with a total energy of 13.6 TeV.
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But researchers have an idea for how to detect these morsels of black holes as they evaporate. First, black hole mergers could be detected through the emission of gravitational waves, which Einstein predicted are tiny ripples in space-time that propagate as objects collide.
Astronomers will then be able to track these mergers with gamma-ray telescopes, such as the High Altitude Water Cherenkov gamma-ray Observatory, which can detect photons with energies between 100 gigaelectron volts (GeV) and 100 TeV.
The team acknowledges that there is a long way to go before the existence of morsel black holes can be confirmed, and so there is still a long way to go before we can conclusively confirm Hawking radiation.
“Since this is a new idea, there is a lot of work to be done. We plan to better model Hawking radiation emission at high energies beyond the TeV scale, where our knowledge of particle physics becomes less precise, and this will involve experimental collaborations,” Cacciapaglia concluded. we’re searching.” “On a longer timeline, we plan to investigate lozenge production in detail during catastrophic astrophysical events such as black hole mergers.”
The team’s research is available as a preprint article in the arXiv repository.