Black holes

Black holes are one of the most vicious cosmic objects our universe has ever seen. However, a question you may have thought about is do black holes live forever or do they die? Well as it turns out Stephen Hawking helped answer this question in 1974. He studied a region near the black holes horizon with quantum mechanics. For those of you who don't know, quantum mechanics describes what happens on the smallest scale possible (think atoms or even subatomic levels). Stephen Hawking found that photons and tiny particles would pop in and out of existence around the black hole (we call them positive particles or negative antiparticles). The light has a very slim chance of escaping before it gets destroyed. If you were looking on you would see a glow. The energy of this glow decreases the mass of the black hole. This continues on until it becomes so small that the black hole becomes unstable. At this point the black hole would burst out energy or what is known as a gamma ray burst and disappear. Of course this doesn't apply to the black holes in our universe. At least not the way you think. The temperature of the glow near the black hole is almost 0 and the energy lost is negligible. It would take a billion times a billion times a billion times a billion times a billion times a billion times a billion times the age of the universe for the black hole to disappear. It truly is amazing to see the theories of the very small come together with the theories of the very large.Black holes do indeed die.

For more information you can check out my new blog post here:http://www.brownspaceman.com/black-holes-live-forever/
Or check out the sources here:http://hubblesite.org/explore_astronomy/black_holes/encyc_mod3_q10.htmland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole#Evaporation