A black hole is, by definition, the darkest place in the universe: a region where gravity is so intense that not even light can escape. And yet, a group of physicists has achieved the unthinkable: Recreate an analog of black hole in the laboratory… and observe how a faint glow began to issue.
The study, published in Physical Review Research, does not mean that someone has made a real black hole on Earth (the catastrophe would be obvious). What the authors did, led by Jasper van Wezel, was Design a “quantum analog”: a physical system that mimics the mathematical behavior of an event horizonthat invisible border that marks the point of non -return around a black hole: once you go through it you are condemned to fall inside.
Van Wezel’s team used a chain of atoms arranged in such a way that the electrons that move through it obey rules similar to those of the particles that fall in a black hole. To achieve this, They manipulated the interaction between the atoms until a “point of no return” was generated: A region of the chain where the energy of the electrons could not escape back. In simple terms, a place that behaves as a horizon of events.
These types of systems are known as black holes analogues. They are not astronomical objects, but They reproduce their effects with other “raw materials”: sound waves in a fluid, electrons in a material, or even pulses of light fibers. The idea is that, if mathematics coincides, the behavior should imitate that of the cosmos.
The surprising thing was that this artificial black hole began to emit a type of radiation. It is no accident: already in 1974, Stephen Hawking predicted that real black holes are not completely dark. According to his theory, Due to the quantum effects of the vacuum, they must emit a faint brightness known as Hawking radiation.
Detecting that radiation in space is almost impossible: A stellar black hole emits less heat than the cosmic microwave background, that fossil radiation of the Big Bang that fills the universe. But in laboratory, with analogues, we can see flashes that mimic this phenomenon.
The experiment showed that, when creating the horizon of events in the atomic chain, it appeared An energy emission with properties similar to those described by Hawking. In other words: a synthetic black hole began to “shine.”
The finding is crucial because the Hawking radiation is one of the most wanted pieces of modern physics: connects general relativity (the theory that describes gravity) with quantum mechanics (which describes the infinitely small). That is, it points towards the elusive “quantum theory of gravity” that would unify the laws of the cosmos.
If these analogues allow studying that radiation in laboratory conditions, Physicists will have a test bench to explore what so far were only calculations on blackboards.
The most amazing thing is that this artificial horizon fits on a laboratory table. Unlike real black holes, which devour stars, here we talk about atoms carefully aligned in a solid material. And yet the result reproduces some of the deepest paradoxes in the universe.In a way, physicists have built a small “pocket universe” where you can study the birth (and perhaps one day die) a black hole.
The goal is now to refine the experiment to confirm whether the brightness detected is, really, a faithful analogue of Hawking radiation, or if it is a different quantum effect. Whatever the result, the truth is that We are getting closer to verifying ideas that, until recently, seemed confined to the confines of space and the pages of science fiction.
If a real black hole in the size of the sun emitted hawking radiation, it would shine less than the heat of an ice cube melting in the dark of space. In the laboratory, the signal detected was of the same order: A flash so faint that it could not even heat a motorcycle of dust.
Even so, the interesting thing is not the amount of radiation (insignificant), but its spectrum and mathematical characteristics coincided with the predicted by Hawking. That is the “concept of concept”: For the first time we can see that an artificial horizon generates the type of emission that a black hole should have.