Scientists Simulate Black Hole In Lab To Test Hawking’s Theory — And The Results Were Unexpected

Stephen Hawking came up with many game-changing theories during his career, and one of the most fascinating ones is the idea that black holes give off a form of radiation.

Back in 1974, Hawking proposed that black holes slowly lose mass over time because they’re constantly paying off an energy cost. That process would lead them to emit radiation.

Even though the idea of Hawking radiation is widely accepted in science, it has never been directly observed. That’s mainly because it's incredibly faint, as noted by Advanced Science News.

But in 2022, a group of researchers tried something bold — they recreated a black hole’s event horizon in a lab to get a closer look at what might happen around it.

This event horizon which is basically the invisible line where nothing, not even light, can escape was simulated by a team from the University of Amsterdam.

According to Science Alert, this experiment showed that the simulated black hole gave off a unique kind of radiation, which closely matched what Hawking predicted decades ago.

To dig deeper into how this radiation works, the team built a lab-based version of the black hole and were surprised to see it start glowing with a strange light.

Hawking radiation happens when quantum fluctuations near a black hole create pairs of particles. The black hole’s immense pull on space-time rips these apart, leading to one escaping as radiation.

This glow is what’s so curious. You wouldn’t expect any kind of light to come from an event horizon, since by definition, nothing is supposed to escape from it.

Gravity sits below the surface of black holes because they are so dense Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Jeremy Schnittman

Black holes are some of the most bizarre and puzzling things in our universe.

They’re so incredibly dense that within a certain distance from their center, not even light — the fastest thing we know can break free from their gravity.

Interestingly, the team noted that this glowing effect only showed up when part of their simulated system extended past the event horizon boundary.

So, what does all of this actually mean for science?

It could suggest that Hawking radiation is tied to a kind of quantum entanglement — a connection between particles that straddles the boundary of the black hole’s event horizon.

The researchers summed it up in their published paper: "This can open a venue for exploring fundamental quantum-mechanical aspects alongside gravity and curved spacetimes in various condensed matter settings,"

Hawking's black hole radiation theory was squared in 1974 Nasa

They also pointed out that the radiation only appeared thermal within a specific range of "hop amplitudes" in their simulations. And that happened only when the model started with a spacetime that was basically flat.

This might mean that the black hole radiation only turns thermal under very specific conditions — possibly when gravity causes a distortion in spacetime itself.

But perhaps the most jaw-dropping part? The simulated Hawking radiation wasn’t invisible. It actually glowed.