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Chapter 22: Problem 32

If even light cannot escape from a black hole, how is it possible for black holes to evaporate?

Short Answer

Expert verified
Black holes can evaporate over time due to a quantum mechanical effect known as Hawking radiation. This process involves the creation and annihilation of particle-antiparticle pairs near the black hole's event horizon, occasionally leading to the black hole losing energy or shrinking.

Step by step solution

01

Understanding Black Holes

A black hole is an astrophysical object with a gravitational pull so potent that nothing, not even light, can escape. This is why black holes appear as pockets of darkness in space.
02

The Concept of Hawking Radiation

In 1974, physicist Stephen Hawking proposed that due to the effects of quantum mechanics, black holes can emit particles - a phenomenon now known as Hawking radiation. According to quantum field theory, particle-antiparticle pairs spontaneously form and annihilate nearby the event horizon of a black hole.
03

Black Hole Evaporation

Occasionally, a particle–antiparticle pair is produced in such a way that one of them ends up inside the event horizon while the other escapes. If the escaping particle is the positive energy one, it can result in the black hole losing some energy (or mass), and thus shrinking. This process, repeated over incredibly long spans of time, could theoretically result in the black hole evaporating entirely.

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Most popular questions from this chapter

A twenty-third-century instructor at Starfleet Academy tells her students, "If someday your starship falls into a black hole, it'll be your own fault." Explain why it would require careful piloting to direct a spacecraft into a black hole.

All the stellar-mass black hole candidates mentioned in the text are members of very short-period binary systems. Explain how this makes it possible to detect the presence of the black hole.

In Einstein's special theory of relativity, two different observers moving at different speeds will measure the same value of the speed of light. Will these same observers measure the same value of, say, the speed of an airplane? Explain.

You drop a ball inside a car traveling at a steady \(50 \mathrm{~km} / \mathrm{h}\) in a straight line on a smooth road. Does it fall in the same way as it does inside a stationary car? How does this question relate to Einstein's special theory of relativity?

Use the Starry Night Enthusiast \({ }^{\mathrm{TM}}\) program to examine X-ray images of galaxies with supermassive black holes at their centers. Open the Options pane and expand the Deep Space layer. Select Chandra Images and deselect all of the other options in this layer. Use the Find pane and Zoom controls to examine each of the following galaxies: (i) \(\mathrm{NGC} \mathrm{4261 \text {;(ii)VirgoA(M87); }}\) (iii) M31. Open the Options pane again and select Messier Objects and deselect Chandra Images and compare the visual images of Virgo A (M87) and M31. Suggest why supermassive black holes were discovered in these galaxies only after relatively recent advances were made in telescope and detector technology.
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