Category: black

Sorry, Black Holes Aren&rsquo;t Actually Black

Sorry, Black Holes Aren’t Actually Black

“If you have an astrophysical object that emits radiation, that immediately defies the definition of black: where something is a perfect absorber while itself emitting zero radiation. If you’re emitting anything, you aren’t black, after all.

So it goes for black holes. The most perfectly black object in all the Universe isn’t truly black. Rather, it emits a combination of all the radiation from all the objects that ever fell into it (which will asymptote to, but never reach, zero) along with the ultra-low-temperature but always-present Hawking radiation.

You might have thought that black holes truly are black, but they aren’t. Along with the ideas that black holes suck everything into them and black holes will someday consume the Universe, they’re the three biggest myths about black holes. Now that you know, you’ll never get fooled again!”

So, you thought you knew all there way to know about black holes? That if you get enough mass together in a small enough volume of space, you create an event horizon: a region from within which nothing can escape, not even light. So how is it, then, that black holes wind up emitting radiation, even long after the last particle of matter to fall into them has ceased?

There are two ways this occurs, and both are completely unavoidable. Black holes aren’t actually black, and this is how we know it.