Hawking radiation

British

noun

astronomy the emission of particles by a black hole. Pairs of virtual particles in the intense gravitational field around a black hole may live long enough for one to move outward when the other is pulled into the black hole, making it appear that the black hole is emitting radiation

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Hawking radiation Scientific

A form of radiation believed to emanate from black holes, emerging from the region just beyond the black hole's event horizon (from which no radiation can emerge). Pairs of virtual particles and antiparticles, created naturally in the vacuum fluctuation near the black hole, are split apart, one particle falling into the black hole and the other radiating away. The energy lost to such radiated particles is believed to come from the mass of the black hole.

Etymology

Origin of Hawking radiation

C20: discovered by Stephen _Hawking

Example Sentences

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Hawking radiation

If they become hot enough, they can emit particles through a process now known as Hawking radiation.

From Science Daily ● Apr. 8, 2026

"As PBHs evaporate, they become ever lighter, and so hotter, emitting even more radiation in a runaway process until explosion. It's that Hawking radiation that our telescopes can detect."

From Science Daily ● Apr. 8, 2026

In 2014, Engelhardt and Aron Wall figured out a way to calculate the extremal surface area of a black hole that is subject to the kind of quantum corrections that cause Hawking radiation.

From Scientific American ● Nov. 30, 2022

Curiously, while they ensure that the island is mapped onto the radiation, they do not generate a definite prediction for specific measurements of the Hawking radiation.

From Scientific American ● Aug. 22, 2022

Pani, meanwhile, is keeping his eyes on the horizon to see whether or not the claim made by Abedi and his colleagues about stimulated Hawking radiation, or echoes in general, is confirmed.

From Scientific American ● Jan. 26, 2022

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Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023