Hawking right! Black holes really not cosmic dead ends

One of each pair falls into the black hole, and one escapes into space.

Now, scientists have managed to build a smaller, tamer version in their lab-and in doing so, they’ve taken a big step closer to figuring out an elusive property of these super-strange objects, one that’s been a big question in physics for the past four decades.

“It relies on the fact that there’s a precise mathematical analogue between the physics of particles near black holes and ripples in flowing fluids…” For the first time, using a model of a black hole that traps sound instead of light, scientists have seen spontaneous evidence of what comes out of them.

At the time, such an idea was completely unheard of – black holes were named as such because their gravitational force is so powerful that not even light can escape once it passes beyond the theoretical point of no return, the event horizon.

Steinhauer’s black hole revealed that the higher energy particle pairs remained entangled, even after one was swallowed by the event horizon. Over time, this slow leak would cause the black hole to shrink and eventually disappear altogether.

“And that means that phonons, particles of sound, trying to travel against the flow are not able to go forward”.

The “Hawking Radiation” effect was proved when it is observed in an artificial black hole just recently.

In the analogue black hole, a line of cold rubidium atoms stream from a laser to create a form of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate.

But Hawking showed that, right on the event horizon itself, pairs of particles are created out of nothing. He was all set up to replicate a black hole with sound waves in the gas.

There has been speculation in the past that if Hawking radiation was ever confirmed in the lab, given the near impossibility of detecting it in real life, that the English physicist could be in the running for a Nobel prize – although it is still far too early to tell whether this could become a reality.

The tube of atoms has two regions: one where the atoms move slowly, and another where they move quickly.

A key finding in the study is that these atoms were “entangled”, or linked with partner atoms, which greatly resonates with the Hawking radiation theory and verifies its quantum nature. “It’s like trying to swim against the current”. “We never could with a real black hole”.

In the journal Nature Physics, he describes having observed the equivalent of a phenomenon called Hawking radiation – predicted to be released by black holes.

Silke Weinfurtner, a researcher from the University of Nottingham also working with black hole analogues, believes that Hawking radiation can be produced experimentally, but is unsure if could be used to study the information paradox. “But we’d like to understand it more deeply, understand the randomness of gravity”. The partners should separate from each other, with one partner on the supersonic side of the horizon and the other forming Hawking radiation. This demonstrates that pairs of phonons were entangled – a sign that they originated spontaneously from the same quantum fluctuation, he says, and that the BEC was producing Hawking radiation.