# Tag Info

133

This is really a footnote to Adobe's answer. Light cannot escape from an event horizon. But how can you check that light can never escape? You can watch the surface for some time $T$, but all you have proved is that light can't escape in the time $T$. This is what we mean by an apparent horizon, i.e. it is a surface from which light can't escape within a ...

44

The expression for the power emitted as Hawking radiation is $$P = \frac{\hbar c^6}{15360 \pi G^2 M^2} = 3.6\times10^{32} M^{-2}\ \text{W} = -c^2 \frac{dM}{dt},$$ where the term on the far right hand side expresses the rate at which the black hole mass decreases due to the emission of Hawking radiation. You can see that what happens is that the power ...

29

At first many people didn't care much for black holes. But later people showed that they were pretty unavoidable features of the theory of general relativity and that theory made other quite precise predictions that were tested and found good. So when you are told that black holes are required if you have GR and GR looks like the best game in town then it ...

21

There are a number of equivalent ways to think about Hawking radiation. One is pair creation, as endolith mentions, where the infalling particle has negative total energy and so reduces the mass of the black hole. Another way, perhaps more useful here, involves Compton wavelength. If the wavelength of a particle (not just photons, by the way) is greater than ...

19

The reason for many contradictory statements regarding the nature of virtual particles is that they are often invoked for heuristical explanations of phenomena that arise within the framework of quantum field theory. One then tries to justify those explanations by attributing certain properties to virtual particles they do not actually possess. What ...

18

There are two ways to approach your question. The first is to explain what Brian Greene means, and the second is to point out that the "particles being swallowed" explanation is a metaphor and isn't actually how the calculation is done. I'll attempt both, but I'm outside my comfort zone so if others can expand or correct what follows please jump in! When a ...

18

...why do we trust black hole physics? ... (physics which is derived by combining quantum mechanics and GR such as Hawking Radiation, things relating to the Information Paradox, etc. ) Formally, there isn't quite a reason to because we've not observed these things yet. But that's also perfectly okay as well because that is how science sometimes works: ...

16

A few things: 1)Just because an observer crossing the event horizon doesn't necessarily feel ill effects AT THE TIME OF CROSSING the horizon, it doesn't mean that they won't inevitably end up at the singularity, where there will be plenty of ill effects--all timelike curves that cross the horizon end up at the singularity in a finite amount of proper time. ...

14

Craig Feinstein asked: Does Stephen Hawking believe that General Relativity is wrong? Here is my answer (I will shift my answer there if some one reopen that question): Stephen Hawking did NOT say that black holes do not exist. Hawking used to think black holes are oblivious. Now he admits (like some other people do) black holes have perfect memory, just ...

9

Any non-mathematical answer is obviously going to be an oversimplification, but as long as you're happy with that here is my oversimplification. The temperature of a big black hole is lower than a small black hole because the curvature at the event horizon decreases with radius. It's the curvature, i.e. the bending, that determines the temperature - more ...

8

Unlike most objects, a black hole's temperature increases as it radiates away mass. The rate of temperature increase is exponential, with the most likely endpoint being the dissolution of the black hole in a violent burst of gamma rays. A complete description of this dissolution requires a model of quantum gravity, however, as it occurs when the black ...

8

Yes, black holes are supposedly near-perfect black bodies. They emit thermal radiation called Hawking radiation, which, however, does not originate from beyond the event horizon, but is a consequence of the interaction of the strong gravitational field outside the horizon with the vacuum. The process is sometimes described as the production of 'virtual' ...

8

The conditions for the existence of the Hawking effect are described in classical terms, i.e you need 1) A Lorentz signature metric 2) A horizon (given, for example, by space flowing into a BH faster than the speed of light, or fluid flowing downstream faster than the speed of sound) 3) Surface gravity at the horizon Those conditions are then applied to ...

8

Hawking radiation is such a miniscule effect we can be sure we'll never detect it for a real astrophysical black hole. The Wikipedia article gives some numbers: For a black hole of the mass of the Sun, the power emitted in Hawking radiation amounts to $9\times10^{-29}\ \mathrm{W}$. Even if all this energy were converted to visible-light photons ...

7

Hawking radiation is a very robust prediction. It comes simply from applying quantum field theory in the curved space-time near the event horizon. It's also part of the synthesis called "black hole thermodynamics", for which string theory provides an explanation in terms of the statistical mechanics of microstates. In the S-matrix of quantum gravity, if ...

7

Also, the book mentions that a negative-energy particle would appear to an observer inside the black hole as positive. Why? Very roughly speaking and in as simple terms as possible, inside the black hole, gravity is so intense that the time coordinate and one of the spatial coordinates (the radial coordinate) swap "roles". That's one way to see why ...

7

As you said, the case of black holes is conceptually totally analogous to the burning books. In principle, the process is reversible, but the probability of the CPT-conjugated process (more accurate a symmetry than just time reversal) is different from the original one because $$\frac{Prob(A\to B)}{Prob(B^{CPT}\to A^{CPT})} \approx \exp(S_B-S_A ).$$ This is ...

7

In the case of Hawking radiation, the direct answer is "no, there is no direct test, nor can we imagine one with anything like current technology." But it is not some wild speculation made in vacuum. The extremely closely related Unruh effect can be derived from basic quantum field theory on a curved spacetime, and many QFT and GR texts have at least an ...

6

I assume you're asking how a black hole can evaporate due to Hawking radiation. The answer is that the Hawking radiation does not come from the event horizon, but instead comes from a region just outside the event horizon so time has not stopped at its position. If you were to watch a black hole form then evaporate, you would never see an event horizon ...

6

I'm kind of in your boat. Hawking radiation violates almost all of the energy conditions, and a stacked set of apparent horizons is two-way transversible when their area decreases with time. I see no reason why the typical assumptions like cosmic censorship should apply. And if cosmic censorship is gone, and the black hole is two-way transversible, then ...

6

We are already living in a nearly empty de Sitter space - the cosmological constant already represents 73% of the energy density in the Universe - and the Universe won't experience any qualitative change in the future: the percentage will just approach 100%. However, once the space may be approximated as an empty de Sitter space, all moments of time are ...

6

Radiation normally contains subtle correlations. For all practical purposes you can't use it, but it's there. Hawking radiation is, according to the theory, perfectly thermal and does not contain any more information than the temperature itself. The problem is that then the process of black hole evaporation is not reversible, in principle. Unlike all other ...

6

Such a process is forbidden by energy conservation: the proton is the lightest baryon (that is the lightest bound state of three quarks). hawking radiation finds it's energy by reducing the energy of the black hole, but there is not lighter baryon state for the proton to go to. Baryon number violating proton decay processes are theorized, but have not been ...

6

About evidence supporting the existence of Event Horizons in these very compact objects, here are some news from the well known Cygnus X-1, one of the most studied compact objects and the most promising candidate for a stellar collapse black hole: ... evidence of just such an event horizon may have been detected in 1992 using ultraviolet (UV) ...

5

The popular description of Hawking radiation with one a particle from a virtual pair falling in and the other escaping is just a pretty picture, "in another model, the process is a quantum tunneling effect, whereby particle-antiparticle pairs will form from the vacuum, and one will tunnel outside the event horizon." In fact, one does not even need the first ...

5

There's a topology change in the spacetime when you complete the $M\rightarrow 0$ limit--The Minkowski spacetime is non-singular, while the Schwarzschild spacetime contains a spacetime singularity for any (positive) value of $M$. You could also look at it in terms of the total energy available for a small mass BH is going to be miniscule, and you would ...

5

Actually working out a rigorous prediction for Hawking radiation, you need to solve the equations for the relevant QFT semi-classically--treating the metric of spacetime as a substitute for the Minkowski metric usually used in QFT. This is similar to deriving the quantum mechanics of the Hydrogen atom without paying attention to the fact that photons exist ...

5

I don't have a full answer to your question, but your question did make me realize that the Hawking radiation must be carrying away angular momentum from a rotating Kerr black hole. If it only carried away energy (mass) the Kerr black hole would become extremal as it lost mass but kept the same angular momentum. This, I think, proves that there has to be ...

5

You do not state the level of understanding you have in physics. Negative mass is a mathematical construct necessary to explain Hawking radiation, and is due to what are called virtual particles. These are lines in Feynman diagrams which diagrams are a shorthand in generating the integrals necessary for the calculation of crossections and lifetimes in ...

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