3 ms·
How do we know it's thermal? How do we know there aren't small fluctuations that are too small for us to detect millions of miles away?
by phendrenad2 5y ago
How do we know it's thermal? How do we know there aren't small fluctuations that are too small for us to detect millions of miles away?
- mannykannot 5y agoAFAIK Hawking radiation has never been detected. It is hypothesized on the basis of current theories of quantum mechanics and gravity, and those assumptions imply a thermal distribution of energy. So, we have a reason to think that Hawking radiation occurs and has this property, while no-one so far has proposed a mechanism that would encode data on it.
- tsimionescu 5y agoIt's important to understand that Hawking radiation is not something we've observed and have noticed seems random. Instead, Hawking radiation is a prediction of a mathematical model. In that model, Hakwing radiation is purely random. If I remember correctly, Hawking radiation is postulated to arise because of fluctuations in the vacuum giving rise to virtual particle pairs. Normally, these would annihiliate back almost instantly. But, when such an event happens near the event horizon, one of them may fall into the black hole, leaving the other one to "escape", and appear as if the event horizon is emitting radiation. Since this radiation is caused by random fluctuations in the void outside the event horizon, it can't be correlated with anything past the even horizon, so it can't carry information about that.