by LISA GROSSMAN
The real deal is a bit too big to fit on a lab bench IMAGE/Jupe/Alamy
A model black hole that traps sound instead of light has been caught emitting quantum particles, thought to be the analogue of the theoretical Hawking radiation. The effect may be the first time that a lab-based black hole has created Hawking particles in the same way expected from real black holes.
Black holes are ultra-dense concentrations of matter left behind when a star or other massive body collapses. Their gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape from their edge – a boundary called the event horizon.
Given that, physicists expected that black holes would be, well, black. But in 1974, Stephen Hawking of the University of Cambridge predicted they should emit a faint glow of particles now known as Hawking radiation.
An oddity of quantum theory that says that the vacuum of space is not truly empty, but fizzes with pairs of particles and their antimatter counterparts. Normally, these pairs annihilate each other and disappear. But if one gets caught inside a black hole’s event horizon, the other is free to escape and becomes observable as Hawking radiation.
The glow from real-life black holes would be too faint to see so, to confirm Hawking’s prediction, physicists have built artificial black holes that mimic the event horizon.
New Scientist for more