Hawking radiation is black-body radiation that is predicted to be released by black holes, due to

quantum effects near the event horizon. It is named after the physicist Stephen Hawking, who
provided a theoretical argument for its existence in 1974.[1]
Hawking radiation reduces the mass and energy of black holes and is therefore also known as black
hole evaporation. Because of this, black holes that do not gain mass through other means are
expected to shrink and ultimately vanish. Micro black holes are predicted to be larger emitters of
radiation than larger black holes and should shrink and dissipate faster.[2]
In June 2008, NASA launched the Fermi space telescope, which is searching for the terminal
gamma-ray flashes expected from evaporating primordial black holes. In the event that
speculative large extra dimension theories are correct, CERN's Large Hadron Collider may be able
to create micro black holes and observe their evaporation. No such micro black hole has ever been
observed at CERN.[3][4][5][6]
In September 2010, a signal that is closely related to black hole Hawking radiation (see analog
gravity) was claimed to have been observed in a laboratory experiment involving optical light pulses.
However, the results remain unverified and debatable.[7][8] Other projects have been launched to look
for this radiation within the framework of analog gravity.
Black holes are sites of immense gravitational attraction. Classically, the gravitation generated by
the gravitational singularity inside a black hole is so powerful that nothing, not even electromagnetic
radiation, can escape from the black hole. It is yet unknown how gravitycan be incorporated
into quantum mechanics. Nevertheless, far from the black hole, the gravitational effects can be weak
enough for calculations to be reliably performed in the framework of quantum field theory in curved
spacetime. Hawking showed that quantum effects allow black holes to emit exact black-body
radiation. The electromagnetic radiation is produced as if emitted by a black body with
a temperature inversely proportional to the mass of the black hole.
Physical insight into the process may be gained by imagining that particle–antiparticle radiation is
emitted from just beyond the event horizon. This radiation does not come directly from the black hole
itself, but rather is a result of virtual particles being "boosted" by the black hole's gravitation into
becoming real particles.[9] As the particle–antiparticle pair was produced by the black hole's
gravitational energy, the escape of one of the particles lowers the mass of the black hole.[10]
An alternative view of the process is that vacuum fluctuations cause a particle–antiparticle pair to
appear close to the event horizon of a black hole. One of the pair falls into the black hole while the
other escapes. In order to preserve total energy, the particle that fell into the black hole must have
had a negative energy (with respect to an observer far away from the black hole). This causes the
black hole to lose mass, and, to an outside observer, it would appear that the black hole has just
emitted a particle. In another model, the process is a quantum tunnelling effect, whereby particle–
antiparticle pairs will form from the vacuum, and one will tunnel outside the event horizon.[9]
An important difference between the black hole radiation as computed by Hawking and thermal
radiation emitted from a black body is that the latter is statistical in nature, and only its average
satisfies what is known as Planck's law of black-body radiation, while the former fits the data better.
Thus thermal radiation contains information about the body that emitted it,[citation needed] while Hawking
radiation seems to contain no such information, and depends only on the mass, angular momentum,
and charge of the black hole (the no-hair theorem). This leads to the black hole information paradox.
However, according to the conjectured gauge-gravity duality (also known as the AdS/CFT
correspondence), black holes in certain cases (and perhaps in general) are equivalent to solutions
of quantum field theory at a non-zero temperature. This means that no information loss is expected
in black holes (since the theory permits no such loss) and the radiation emitted by a black hole is
probably the usual thermal radiation. If this is correct, then Hawking's original calculation should be
corrected, though it is not known how (see below).
A black hole of one solar mass (M☉) has a temperature of only 60 nanokelvins (60 billionths of
a kelvin); in fact, such a black hole would absorb far more cosmic microwave background
radiation than it emits. A black hole of 4.5×1022 kg (about the mass of the Moon, or
about 133 μm across) would be in equilibrium at 2.7 K, absorbing as much radiation as it emits. Yet
smaller primordial black holes would emit more than they absorb and thereby lose mass.[9]