Sounds intense
One of the weird things about the Universe is the vacuum of space is, physicists believe, full of "virtual particles" which briefly exist and then disappear again almost immediately. Every so often, a pair of these virtual particles contain enough energy that they become "regular" particles which go off into the Universe and interact with other matter and energy.
According to Hawking, if this happens right at the event horizon of a black hole, one particle will get sucked back into the black hole, but the other particle will escape. The escapee particle has a mass/energy associated with it which it derives from the black hole. Any mass/energy carried away by such particles is mass/energy the black hole no longer possesses.
Hence, by Hawking's theory, an isolated black hole which could not accumlate additional mass from surrounding space would eventually "boil away" because its mass would be carried off by this Hawking radiation.
I hope this explanation made sense.
hawk
hôk/
verb
gerund or present participle: hawking
carry around and offer (goods) for sale, typically advertising them by shouting.
"street traders were hawking costume jewelry"
synonyms: peddle, sell, tout, vend, trade in, traffic in, push
"hawking his wares on the street"
ra·di·a·tion
?rade'aSH(?)n/
noun
noun: radiation
1.
Physics
the emission of energy as electromagnetic waves or as moving subatomic particles, especially high-energy particles that cause ionization.
the energy transmitted by radiation, as heat, light, electricity, etc.
plural noun: radiations
2.
Biology
divergence out from a central point, in particular evolution from an ancestral animal or plant group into a variety of new forms.
So it's either light from an electric sign, or something about evolution.
In his book "A Brief History of Time" Hawking proposed a mechanism by which black holes could both emit radiation and eventually evaporate. According to quantum theory, there are an innumerable number of virtual particle which pop into existence in pairs, one with positive energy and one with negative energy, which annihilate each other in such a short time they can never be detected directly. They are believed to be "real" though, as evidenced by the "Casimir effect".
So, near the event horizon of a black hole, Hawking imagined one of these virtual particle pairs appearing, and the negative energy particle falling into the black hole, and the positive energy particle escaping into space. The particle with negative energy would have the effect of reducing the black hole's mass. The positive energy particle would fly off as a real particle. This process is called "Hawking Radiation".
