The release of the first black hole photo confirmed the radiation of the black hole. Can Hawking win the Nobel Prize?

The night before yesterday, six countries in the world released the first black hole photo in human history, which is an event of great historical significance for human beings, and the term black hole is no stranger to us. When it comes to black holes, many people may unconsciously think of Hawking.

Hawking is a famous cosmologist. Although he has been dead for a year, people still think of him from time to time. Unfortunately, Hawking didn't get a glimpse of the true face of a black hole before his death. Although Hawking may already have a standard model of a black hole in his mind, if he can see it with his own eyes, Hawking should have no regrets all his life. After all, Hawking is also an active builder of the standard model of black holes. The fictional black hole model in the sci-fi blockbuster Interstellar was made by Hawking and his friend Kip Thorne, the Nobel Prize winner in physics, as scientific consultants.

But in fact, the publication of the first black hole photo does not seem to prove Hawking's radiation, so Hawking will not win the Nobel Prize in physics. Speaking of the concept of black hole, it is not the first time Hawking put forward it. Before the general theory of relativity was put forward, that is, at the end of18th century, in the era of classical mechanics, some scientists put forward a concept similar to a black hole. At that time, two scientists had similar ideas, one was Laplace and the other was Michelle. They imagine that there may be a celestial body in the universe. This celestial body has a great mass, so its gravity is strong, so it is light.

The concept of black hole was really put forward after Einstein's general theory of relativity was published. Shortly after Einstein published his general theory of relativity, a German scientist named Schwarzschild calculated some parameters of a black hole by using the formula of gravitational field. He found that when the density of a celestial body reaches a certain level, a bottomless pit will form in the universe, and this bottomless pit is a black hole. So if we really want to say the discoverer of the black hole, it must be Schwarzenegger. Hawking is using quantum mechanics to further improve the theory of black holes. More importantly, Hawking is a popular science writer, so people know more about him.

However, the black hole discovered this time does not prove Hawking radiation. Hawking radiation can actually be observed in a special black hole. The black hole discovered this time is 55 million light years away from the earth. It was shot simultaneously by eight telescopes in six places around the world. The mass of M87 black hole is 6.5 billion times that of the sun, and it is considered as a very large black hole. Hawking radiation comes from the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics, if a pair of virtual particles appear around the critical horizon of a black hole, one of them will fall into the black hole, while the other will escape from the black hole and take away part of the mass of the black hole.

This is equivalent to the energy of the black hole being radiated away, but Hawking radiation is too weak, which is not an order of magnitude with the X-rays and γ-rays radiated by the accretion disk around the black hole. It is not easy to detect the existence of black holes, let alone Hawking radiation. In fact, Hawking radiation is only obvious in a black hole called Taichu, which is a black hole that appeared when the universe was born. The mass of this black hole is very small, but Hawking's radiation speed is not slow, even exceeding its own absorption speed, so in the end, this black hole will die. The universe has been born for 65.438+037 billion years, and this black hole should have died out long ago. So Hawking radiation only exists in theory.