Quote:
On 2002-03-01 14:45, Silas wrote:
There was an article in Scientific American some years ago, entitled "The Breakdown of Empty Space." Apparently, in the vicinity of a heavy atomic nucleus, you can get "Hawking Radiation," i.e., the "realization" of one of a virtual pair of particles. The other particle is caught by the nucleus. So, if the surface of a neutron star is sharp or sheer enough (and it seems as if it ought to be) then it probably would emit tiny amounts of Hawking Radiation...
Silas
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It seems like this would not conserve energy. If a particle/anti-particle pair are spontaneously created in normal space, they are attracted to each other and destroy each other. The combined process conserves energy although the separate processes of creation and destruction do not. So if in normal space, the virtual pair do not recombine, the process will violate the conservation of energy.
The black hole gets around this by the event horizon. Below the event horizon, spacelike becomes timelike and timelike becomes spacelike, everything becomes reversed. So the anti-particle caught by the black hole removes energy from it.
This is how I understand the process, and I am neither a black hole nor a particle physics expert. So take everything above with a big Everest size grain of salt.
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Wiley on 2002-03-01 15:50 ]</font>