As soon as a particle meets up with its antiparticle, they destroy each other in a fraction of a second, and the universe at large doesn’t notice their presence. These couplets emerge from the “empty” vacuum of space, and quantum mechanics tells us they constantly wink in and out of existence everywhere. Hawking wanted to know what would happen to pairs of particles-a particle and its antiparticle partner-that spontaneously appeared at a black hole’s event horizon.
Anything slightly inside the event horizon will unavoidably fall into the black hole, whereas anything just outside it still has a chance to escape. That’s when British physicist Stephen Hawking began thinking about what happened to particles that experienced the unparalleled gravitational forces at the edge of a black hole, a place known as the event horizon. The issue of what happens when the very small world meets the very large was first considered in the 1970s. But if the new calculations are correct, such outcomes may be commonplace, even when black holes aren’t around. To describe events on such different scales, scientists must use both Einstein’s theory of relativity (rules governing the big stuff) and quantum mechanics (rules for itty-bitty things), leading to some outlandish effects. In that extreme environment, the largest and smallest things in the universe rub up against one another. That’s the claim in a new study of physics effects that were previously thought to occur only near a black hole. Stars, planets, people and petunias: everything emits a special kind of radiation and will, if it sticks around long enough, evaporate into nothing.
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