ASK Space

ASTROPHYSICS

Can a black hole disappear?

Surprisingly, yes, a black hole could disappear. It would take a very long time though. Black holes are regions of space which have’ so much mass in such a small volume that the escape velocity – the speed you need to go to escape the gravitational pull of the body – becomes greater than the speed of light. These cosmic behemoths can also grow in mass as material falls onto them. If a black hole finds itself in a quiet region of the universe, however, the strange world of quantum mechanics and the extreme gravity of the black hole cause a phenomenon named’ Hawking radiation, one of the discoveries of the late Stephen Hawking.

In quantum mechanics, space is full of entangled ‘virtual’ particle pairs, which spring into existence from quantum fluctuations and just as rapidly disappear again. When this happens right at the event years to evaporate. Given that our entire universe is currently approximately 13.8 billion years old, this isn’t something we have to worry about for a while.