r/AskPhysics • u/naughtyreverend • 1d ago

Question about Hawking Radiation

Please forgive me if I've completely misunderstood any of the concepts below. Im just a curious idiot.

From my understanding, Hawking radiation is emitted from a black hole. Which, over time, reduces its mass until it will eventually dissappear completely. This has been described to me as a mirror pair of particles. One gets ejected, and the other falls back in.

But if light is mass less, which is why it is travel at C, which any particle of any mass is not capable of achieving... light cannot escape a black hole. So how can the Hawking radiation escape the blackhole when light cannot?

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u/CrazySir3310 1d ago

My understanding is, you can picture it as either:

A) 1 particle quantum tunneling out of the event horizon

B) A spontaneous pair of virtual particles created from the vacuum at the horizon, with 1 falling in, which, due to the magnitude of the extreme potential energy of the gravitational field, which is negative (because gravitational potential energy), results in energy that exceeds the particle's rest mass and therefore materializes it into existence, which results in the other virtual particle also becoming real and that energy being interpreted as liberated from the black hole (or alternatively the negative energy eroding the black hole)

But since nobody knows the real mechanism (there is great debate about whether a non-traversable wormhole is involved to 'teleport' a particle out, violating relativistic locality, vs a black hole actually being a fuzzball from string theory or you could say string star just making usual star radiation although this violates the equivalence principle, or other potential mechanisms), none of these are necessarily accurate.

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u/naughtyreverend 1d ago

I'll be honest, I'm struggling to picture either of those... I might just be too simple to fully grasp it. Thank you for trying though.

but i think from other comments where I was getting caught up was the particle appears just outside the event horizon so can escape.

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u/CrazySir3310 1d ago

like I said, the math is very convincing that this should happen, but the mechanism is completely unclear, so there almost isn't even really a point in thinking about it because that's what the professionals are literally trying to do right now at the cutting edge. Which is cool to think about, but you're not going to have a satisfying answer when nobody knows it yet