Everyone always talks about black holes and how things go in and never come out. But what is a black hole exactly? Has anyone ever described it to you? Most people know it as a dead star, but what does that mean?

Black holes are extremely massive objects with immense gravities that don't allow anything to escape, not even light. They are interesting places where many different parts of physics come together and sometimes even break down. The sheer size and gravity of black holes becomes interesting when you think about how they might interact with theories of the infinitesimally small, known as quantum mechanics. And it is quantum mechanics that holds the answer to how black holes die.

In quantum mechanics, subatomic positive particles and negative antiparticles pop into existence all the time. Since the positive particles have positive mass and the negative antiparticles have an opposite negative mass, they cancel each other out, and nothing really significant actually happens. But what if these particles and antiparticles came into existence right next to a black hole? What happens then? Do they do the same cancellation?

Famed English physicist Stephen Hawking theorized that something different happens around a black hole. The idea is that particles and antiparticles may not be able to automatically cancel each other out because the black hole's gravity pulls the negative antiparticle into black hole-oblivion. This process leaves the positive particle alone and "uncancelled," making it "real." These positive particles then, are emitted from the black hole. The phenomenon is called Hawking Radiation.

But that's not the end. After a long long time, the black hole would lose mass due to the gradual addition of antiparticles. As Hawking says, the black holes would evaporate. During evaporation, the black hole emits energy in the form of the positive particles that escape. The more massive the back hole, the more energy would be released. Over time, the black hole would eventually lose so much mass that it would become small and unstable. This is the dramatic end. The black hole would then lose the rest of its mass in a short amount of time as abrupt explosions—we can detect these explosions as gamma ray bursts. The end.

So, yes, black holes do die, and they do so when the theories of the extremely large come together with the theories of the very small. They do so slowly, and then all at once.

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Image Credit: Alan Riazuelo (via Wikimedia Commons)