1338h4x Posted:

I will admit I’m not too well-versed in particle physics, so can someone enlighten me a bit about how Hawking Radiation supposedly works? I understand it comes from a quark-antiquark pair being positioned along the edge of the event horizon in such a way that one gets sucked in and the other flies away, and these antiquarks could annihilate some of the matter that makes up the black hole, thus causing it to lose mbum and possibly fade away eventually. But what I don’t get is the idea that more antimatter gets sucked in than matter. Shouldn’t they be roughly equal-ish, so the black hole stays in a fairly stable equilibrium? Also given where these holes would be hypothetically be surfacing, there wouldn’t be as much antimatter to suck in as there is regular matter.

I’m sure there’s some mistake in my bumumptions, given how every scientist is damn confident this won’t happen. I’m just not sure what it is that I’m misunderstanding here.

You’re almost right. This is still simplified as ****, but it’s not that a particle and anti-particle pair are positioned at the event horizion, it’s that a virtual particle and anti-particle pair is being created on the event horizon. One of them falls into it and the other escapes. Since the one that escapes must have positive energy, the one falling into it needs to have negative energy for there to be equilibrium. The black hole is only losing energy from hawking radiation.