{"id":30119,"date":"2016-09-13T09:20:13","date_gmt":"2016-09-13T16:20:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/09\/benchtop-black-holes-help-physicists-glimpse-the-quantum-universe"},"modified":"2017-06-04T14:16:17","modified_gmt":"2017-06-04T21:16:17","slug":"benchtop-black-holes-help-physicists-glimpse-the-quantum-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/09\/benchtop-black-holes-help-physicists-glimpse-the-quantum-universe","title":{"rendered":"Benchtop Black Holes Help Physicists Glimpse the Quantum Universe"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A black hole is a physicist\u2019s playground: A place where some of the most bizarre and fundamental concepts in physics can be observed and tested. However, there is currently no way to directly observe black holes in action; these bodies of matter don\u2019t emit the sort of radiation, like light or X-rays, that telescopes are equipped to detect. Fortunately, physicists have figured out ways to imitate the conditions of a black hole in the lab\u2014and in creating analogues of black holes, they are beginning to unravel some the most fascinating puzzles in physics.<\/p>\n

Jeff Steinhauer, a researcher in the Physics Department of Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, recently caught the attention of the physics community when he announced that he had used an analogue black hole to confirm Stephen Hawking\u2019s 1974 theory that black holes emit electromagnetic radiation, known as Hawking radiation. Hawking predicted that this radiation would be caused by the spontaneous creation of a particle-antiparticle pair at the event horizon, the point at the edge of a black hole beyond which nothing\u2014not even light\u2014can escape. Under the terms of Hawking\u2019s theory, as one of the particles crosses the event horizon and is captured by the black hole, the other would be ejected into space. Steinhauer\u2019s experiment was the first to exhibit the sort of spontaneous fluctuations that support Hawking\u2019s calculations.<\/p>\n

Physicists have cautioned that this experiment still doesn\u2019t confirm the existence of Hawking radiation in astronomical black holes, as Steinhauer\u2019s black hole isn\u2019t exactly the same as one we might observe in space. It\u2019s not yet physically possible to create the intense gravitational fields that form black holes. Instead, the analogue imitates a black hole\u2019s ability to absorb light waves by using sound.<\/p>\n

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A black hole is a physicist\u2019s playground: A place where some of the most bizarre and fundamental concepts in physics can be observed and tested. However, there is currently no way to directly observe black holes in action; these bodies of matter don\u2019t emit the sort of radiation, like light or X-rays, that telescopes are [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":395,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/395"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30119"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66260,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30119\/revisions\/66260"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}