Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity fascinates several physicists including Stephen Hawking. The theory predicted the three characteristics of a black hole- mass spin and charge and tells that energy can neither be created nor destroyed but instead it can be transferred.
For decades, it has been one of the topics that leave numerous questions until in 1970 Hawking built on Einstein's work. In the law of quantum mechanics, it is said that if an object falls into a black hole, that object can never go back, thus, it eventually disappears but its information leaves behind. Physicists believe that the information continues to linger at the edge of oblivion in the soft hair of quantum particles. For Hawking and his colleagues, there is a contradiction.
In Hawking's paper "Black Hole Entropy and Soft Hair," they discovered that objects entropy changes once it was tossed in the black hole. He said that black hole has temperature and since hot objects lose heat they would evaporate and disappear. "Any object has a temperature also has an entropy," said Professor Perry.Now, a proof of Hawking's theory also known as "Hawking's Radiation" had been made and this new development provides a possible answer for the Black hole paradox.
Unlike the real black hole in space which consumes light, the researchers' model of black hole consumes sound. Despite the difference, scientists make sure that just like with light, sound can also either move away from the material or go into it and never escape. The said model was created by trapping 8,000 rubidium atoms in a laser.
Additionally, to gather data about the radiation around the black hole, scientists used a quantum material "Bose-Einstein Condensate" since available instruments cannot observe the radiation because of the great distance. Preliminary evidence of Hawking Radiation was already observed by the same researchers in 2016. This year more details were discovered based on their second experiment. New readings on the black hole thermal spectrum and wavelength matched the late physicist's predictions.
"The way I see it, what we saw that Hawking's calculations were correct," Steinhauer told Gizmodo. With the gathered evidence, the group will still continue the experiments to obtain more information about the radiation specifically to find out if it changes with time.
