Comet Enthusiast

Is a Nobel Prize on its way to Stephen Hawking? Hawking is world renowned for his work on gravity and black holes, including his 1974 postulation of the eponymous Hawking radiation, a theory that says a black hole should give off a stream of particles from its outer boundary. Hawking predicted that black holes emit thermal radiation due to quantum effects, which causes the black holes to lose mass and vanish. 

Despite numerous attempts, the faint emission has never been detected from a real black hole, so researchers have sought a number of laboratory proxies to demonstrate the general principles of the phenomenon. Now, Franco Belgiorno at the University of Milan and his colleagues claim to have observed something that looks very much like Hawking radiation from an event hole horizon they created in the lab.