• Question: do black holes ever end

    Asked by 238furk43 to Chris, Joanne, Kathryn, Kieran, Sarah on 8 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Kieran Fraser

      Kieran Fraser answered on 8 Nov 2017:

      That’s a super interesting question! Stephen Hawking asked himself the very same question and came up with a possible solution:

      We believed black holes are regions of space that have such strong forces of gravity that nothing escapes, not even light. However, Stephen Hawking proposed that some tiny particles do actually escape and are emitted from the black hole – he called this Hawking Radiation. So he thinks that the black hole is actually losing (tiny amounts!) of energy over time, which will cause the black hole to evaporate. As the black hole gets smaller and smaller, it would become unstable and eventually explode abruptly.

      Scientists are still attempting to prove this theory of Hawking’s. Recently a team of scientists think they have enough evidence to prove him right – which may mean he gets a Nobel Prize!

    • Photo: Sarah Guerin

      Sarah Guerin answered on 8 Nov 2017:

      Yeah, like Kieran said, everything we know about black holes is theoretical- no one has studied a black hole up close! So no one knows yet, but we have lots of ideas and maths that we are using to try and find out.

    • Photo: Chris Werner

      Chris Werner answered on 8 Nov 2017:

      Brilliant question and unfortunately this has never been observed, so is down to theory. The others have touched on the Hawking radiation over time, so black holes will eventually decay/evaporate over time, though we are talking about billions of years for this to happen!

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