Stephen Hawking predicted that black holes evaporate by analyzing the interaction between quantum fields and spacetime curved by black holes.

Hawking radiation is Stephen Hawking's theoretical prediction that black holes emit radiation and eventually evaporate. Applied to known black holes, their radiation is so weak that it would take vastly longer than the current age of the universe for them to disappear.

Hawking radiation may not have been discovered without Jacob Bekenstein first convincing Stephen Hawking that black holes follow the laws of thermodynamics. The graduate student showed that black holes could shrink, setting the stage for Hawking's most significant contribution.

His theoretical work—especially on black holes emitting radiation, now known as Hawking radiation—challenged long-held ideas. He also brought complex physics to the public through bestselling books like "A Brief History of Time."

After predicting black holes could evaporate and before undergoing a tracheotomy, Stephen Hawking conducted interviews in his voice, explaining phenomena like black holes and the Big Bang. In this clip, he explains how curiosity drives humans to become “masters of the universe.”

This creates a region where spacetime curves infinitely, known as a singularity. Black holes' intense mass and energy allow them to trap light, distort time and space, and present challenges with reconciling Einstein's theory with quantum mechanics.

Black holes contain singularities where information about the material that fell in is lost, violating quantum mechanics. Instead, modeled as a bundle of strings, information is stored and slowly released as the black hole evaporates.

Stephen Hawking's PhD thesis mathematically showed that singularities—points of no volume and infinite density—are an expected feature of nature. It laid the theoretical groundwork for a model of the universe where everything originates from a single point.

Black holes are known to grow with increased mass but lose energy during mergers through the emission of gravitational waves. Amid these competing factors, the black hole area theorem—confirmed in 2021 using LIGO data—states that a merged black hole's size cannot be smaller than the combined surface area of its progenitors.

The horizon is often surrounded by an accretion disc of superheated material that orbits the black hole while emitting radiation. Light emitted behind a black hole can be bent around it to create the appearance of a ring of material known as a photon sphere.

When a massive star can no longer release enough energy through fusion in its core to fight off gravitational collapse, the dense core collapses first, producing an event horizon that traps light within it, including some light produced within the star at the time of collapse. As more material falls into the growing event horizon, the star will appear to eclipse itself from the inside.

Quanta Magazine provides a deep dive into black holes and the black hole information paradox. For a very long time it was believed nothing could escape a black hole. Therein lies the paradox. Per quantum mechanics, whatever falls into a black hole should not necessarily be lost forever, and may eventually return. In a landmark series of calculations, physicists have proved that black holes can shed information.

Despite its immense magnitude, the force of gravity exerted by black holes acts in the same way as provided by stars and planets, allowing objects to maintain stable orbits around them. Even in cases where tidal forces and friction cause objects to change their orbit and fall towards a black hole, they are more likely to glance by, be whipped around, and get ejected rather than absorbed.

All objects above absolute zero emit electromagnetic radiation, with the amount and distribution determined by temperature alone. The shape and intensity of this radiation follow Planck's law, while Wien's law governs the peak wavelength.

Although a mathematical possibility according to general relativity, there is no observational evidence for these objects, which would endlessly eject material into the universe via anti-gravity. It is also unclear how they would form or avoid collapsing due to the gravity of the ejected material.

Think you know everything about black holes? You might be surprised. Thought of as massive vacuum cleaners sucking up everything in their cosmic path, black holes actually accrete matter at an incredibly slow pace. Yet, some black holes existed when the universe was only a few billion years young. Learn more in this BBC report.

The energy emanates outward in the form of gravitational waves, which can be detected at observatories like LIGO. After merging, it is impossible to determine the characteristics of the two black holes that merged to create it.

Along with their spin and charge, mass is used to categorize black holes as supermassive, intermediate, or stellar-mass. However, ongoing research suggests various additional types may exist, including primordials that formed one second into the universe's birth, fuzzballs—tangles of vibrating strings—and gravastars, which have a shell of dense matter around repulsive vacuum energy.

At that location, the warping of space-time is so severe that the entirety of an object's space-time motion is solely through space, leaving it immobile in the time dimension. Faraway observers looking at the object would see it appear frozen before slowly dimming and reddening.

Much of the film Interstellar is centered on the existence of a wormhole and black hole, which happen to be two of the most perplexing things in the universe. Astrophysicist and StarTalk Radio host Neil deGrasse Tyson explains how wormholes and black holes work in real life in this two-minute video.

If a fish screams as it falls down a cascading waterfall accelerating to ridiculous speeds, will his fish friends above hear him scream? This analogy, odd as it is, has become an essential tool in the astrophysicists kit for learning how enigmatic black holes operate. Lab experiments mirroring the so-called sonic black hole have achieved insights for their cosmic counterparts. Read how it works in this brief piece.

When scientists first tried calculating the radiation emitted by a heated object, their assumption was that energy was equally distributed across wavelengths and produced infinite energy at low wavelengths. This contradicted observations, which showed near-zero energy intensity at those values.

Thermal radiation results from random motions of particles that make up an object, which only theoretically cease at 0 Kelvin, or -273.15 degrees Celsius. The greatest intensity of thermal radiation, also known as blackbody radiation, is emitted at a characteristic wavelength corresponding to the object's surface temperature.

When renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking did not rule out the possibility of time travel in his posthumous book Brief Answers to the Big Questions, many hopefuls got excited. But, unfortunately for them, Hawking believed that yet-to-be discovered laws of physics will prove time travel impossible. This piece outlines some practicalities about the speed of light and wormholes that lend way to Hawking’s prediction.

Diagnosed with ALS at 21 and told he had two years to live, Stephen Hawking went on to change our understanding of black holes and the universe, living 55 more years and defying every expectation.

At the center of black holes is a theoretical point of infinite density called a singularity. Alternatively, one theory suggests a black hole's core could form a Planck star—a mind-bogglingly tiny object just a trillionth trillionth trillionth of a meter in size.

Just as one becomes exhausted as they walk up a flight of stairs against gravity, light is predicted to lose energy as it travels out of a gravitational well created by an object warping spacetime. This is observable through a decrease in the frequency of light toward longer, redder wavelengths.

Don’t let the name fool you: A black hole is anything but empty space. Rather, it is a great amount of matter packed into a very small area - think of a star ten times more massive than the Sun squeezed into a sphere approximately the diameter of New York City.

Building on the work of Richard Tolman and George Volkoff, Oppenheimer reasoned that, once massive enough, a hypothetical, star-sized atomic nucleus would be unable to stave off gravitational collapse with neutron degeneracy—quantum pressure—alone. The mathematical model estimated the maximum mass of a non-rotating neutron star, known as the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit.

Hawking famously placed wagers on high-stakes questions in theoretical physics—such as the Higgs boson—for fun and to draw attention to science. When Hawking lost a bet about Cygnus X-1 being a black hole, he paid up with a magazine subscription.

Traditional physics breaks down at the moment of the Big Bang, but quantum theory suggests that “empty” space is never truly empty. In 1973, physicist Edward Tryon proposed that our universe began from a quantum energy blip in the quantum vacuum.

When stars collapse, the black holes they form can have the mass of either 50 suns or over 120—but current models claim strongly that no black hole should have a mass that falls in between that range. But in 2019, gravitational wave observatories detected two within it: one at 66 solar masses, the other at 85. The discovery disrupted established science and left researchers questioning the Standard Model of physics.

German physicist Max Planck publishes his groundbreaking study of the effect of radiation on a “blackbody” substance, and the quantum theory of modern physics

Theoretical cosmologist Kip Thorne was consulted and collaborated with the film's visual effects team to develop new rendering software, integrate general relativity, and generate ultra-high-resolution visuals. The results were so accurate, they were published in scientific journals.