this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
122 points (95.5% liked)

No Stupid Questions

43032 readers
837 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Feeling like taking a vacation.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] victorz@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Do they do that? Is that what the Big Bang was?

[–] remon@ani.social 33 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] Lumidaub@feddit.org 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That's a hypothesis though, right? They haven't detected any yet afaik (which the article could make clearer in its introduction).

[–] remon@ani.social 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah, it mentions it at the end under the "Experimental observation" section.

[–] Lumidaub@feddit.org 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yes, I know, but realistically, many (most?) people just want brief, general information, which is what the introductory paragraph is for, no? So I'd argue it should say "hypothesised" or "predicted" somewhere in the, ideally, first sentence.

[–] remon@ani.social 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

It does say that it is a "model" and "predicted" in the first paragraph.

[–] Lumidaub@feddit.org 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Okay, might have worded that better. It says "The radiation was not predicted by previous models" and "is predicted to be extremely faint", not "it is predicted to exist" - and also "[it] is many orders of magnitude below [...]" which sounds like a statement of fact. I realise this may be nitpicky but I don't know if people who don't know anything about the subject would interpret that as "we don't really know if it even exists yet".

[–] ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It is difficult to be certain about unmeasured things. It would help everyone if those who don't know anything about the subject would understand that science is about approaching clarity and the scientists are so zoomed out on some things that it isn't always as clear as anyone wants. But scientists are still trying to answer the question. They are trying to help.

[–] Lumidaub@feddit.org 1 points 1 week ago

I agree, definitely. But here we are, the reality is that people read first paragraphs at best (which there can be valid reasons for) and take away "ah yes, Hawking radiation is a thing black holes do, science says so". A reader who is interested further and has the mental capacities after working 8 hours 5 days a week to scroll down and read about experimental observations might also realise "oh wait, it isn't actually clear whether it does exist" but you can't expect that from everybody (unfortunate as that may be).

This particular instance may be harmless because it probably doesn't affect anything in everyday life. But in general I think a first paragraph in an encyclopaedic source that wants to inform the general public should be very clear about it when a thing is hypothesised and hasn't been shown to exist.

[–] timroerstroem@feddit.dk 13 points 1 week ago (1 children)

More or less. In my layman's understanding: Black holes 'evaporate' slowly through Hawking radiation, losing mass as a function of their surface area (simplistically, particle/anti-particle pairs 'pop out of nothing' near the event horizon, one gets swallowed up the other escapes, this means a net loss of energy, which has to 'paid' by the black hole losing mass, think E=mc^2^).

Since a black hole behaves (geometrically) like any other sphere, the proportion of its area to its volume will grow as the black hole loses mass (i.e. it will have more and more relative area the smaller it gets), this process speeds up over time thus ending in what I guess you could call an explosion (more a whimper than a bang, to borrow a phrase).

Part 2 of your question: We don't know.

[–] meco03211@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Wouldn't the hawking radiation need to be a higher rate than the black hole is absorbing matter?

[–] remon@ani.social 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yes, the effect is extremely tiny and easily offset when a black hole is "feeding".

[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Which will eventually happen to all black holes because the last things remaining will be black holes, so there would be no matter to absorb.

[–] meco03211@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Which begs the question, what happens to the estranged particle that escapes the black hole from hawking radiation.

[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 4 points 1 week ago

They'll wander forever through an ever expanding space, meaning they probably won't ever come across a different particle.

Eventually everything will reach equilibrium, aka the state where nothing moves anymore because everything it could react with is too far away to cause any reaction.

[–] Ziggurat@jlai.lu 1 points 1 week ago

Which is why it would work with a small black hole, but not with a large one