Lab-grown black hole proves Stephen Hawking's radiation claims – physicist

But 'pioneering paper' also contains some contradictory data, says prof

16 Aug 2016 at 16:04, Katyanna Quach
The Register Columnists

A physicist claims to have created a sonic black hole to observe Hawking radiation and its quantum weirdness, all within the safe confines of his laboratory.

The gravitational pull of a black hole was once assumed to be so strong that no object or light could escape once it was dragged beyond the event horizon, making it invisible. But in 1974, Stephen Hawking and Jacob Berkenstein dispelled that idea, and said black holes weren’t entirely black, they emitted energy – and that in fact, this caused them to shrink.

The energy was in the form of electromagnetic radiation - later known as Hawking radiation - and has never been observed in space. The radiation doesn’t come from the black hole itself, and has been interpreted as the creation of a particle-antiparticle pair; one falls inside the black hole and the other escapes.

So, in order to study the quantum nature of Hawking radiation, Jeff Steinhauer, a researcher at the Technion-Israel of Technology, turned to using a Bose Einstein condensate - a type of superfluid - instead.

More:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/16/quantum_hawking_radiation_has_been_created_in_a_lab_claims_physicst/