Unbelievable: scientists created a black hole in a laboratory, which began to behave very strangely after a long time

THE black holes have always attracted the interest of scientists and ordinary people. As scientists strive to find new information about these regions of our universe, we are all forever fascinated by this scientific concept. In a revolutionary experiment, scientists managed to create a replica of a black hole, and this could solve many questions about this phenomenon, reports Science Alert.

A team of scientists has observed the equivalent of Hawking radiation using a chain of aligned atoms to recreate the event horizon of a black hole. Hawking radiation describes hypothetical particles produced at the boundary of a black hole. This radiation is said to indicate that the temperature of black holes is inversely proportional to their mass. In simpler terms, the smaller the black hole, the hotter it glows.

Scientists say the discovery could help resolve the conflict between two currently incompatible frameworks for understanding the universe: General relativity, which defines the behavior of gravity as a continuous field called spacetime; and quantum mechanics, which uses the mathematics of probability to describe the behavior of discrete particles.

This is where black holes come into play. They are so dense that nothing can return beyond a certain distance from the black hole’s center of mass. This distance – which varies depending on the mass of the black hole – is called the event horizon. We can only speculate about what happens when an object reaches its limit, because nothing comes back with relevant information about its fate. Assuming Hawking radiation exists, it is currently too weak for humans to detect. We may never be able to separate it from the crackling static of the universe. However, we can examine its characteristics in laboratory conditions by producing black hole analogs.

This has been done before, but now a team led by Lotte Mertens from the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands has done something unique. They created a kind of event horizon that disrupted the wavelike nature of electrons. According to the scientists, the effect of this simulated event horizon produced a temperature increase that met theoretical expectations for a similar black hole system, but only when part of the chain extended beyond the event horizon.

This may mean that the entanglement of particles across the event horizon plays a role in the generation of Hawking radiation. The simulated Hawking radiation was thermal only in a limited range of hop amplitudes and in simulations that started by simulating a “flat” spacetime. This shows that Hawking radiation can only be thermal under certain conditions and when the curvature of spacetime changes due to gravity. The video below perfectly summarizes the essence of the experiment:

It seems unclear what this means to quantum gravity looking at it, but the model provides a means to explore the origin of Hawking radiation in an environment that is not affected by the chaotic dynamics of black hole formation. Moreover, because it is so simple, it can be used in many experimental setups. The researchers wrote: “This could open the way to investigate fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics in addition to gravity and curved spacetime in different condensed matter settings.”

_{source: Scoop}