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I keep hearing about big bang, but there are no white holes and no black hole has been observed exploding. So is there a point in which a black hole reaches critical mass?

Qmechanic
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Muze
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1 Answers1

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Black hole evaporation depends on its mass. As the mass shrinks, the evaporation will be faster. In its last stage, this will be more like an explosion.

It is a significantly different thing as the supernovas or the nuclear bombs explode. In their case, there is a minimal mass which is required for this process to happen.

Now the problem is that the size of the currently known black holes are all at least 3-4 solar mass. They would require around $10^{50}$ years to evaporate. Compare this to the age of the Universe ($13.7\cdot 10^9$ years).

Remark: nobody ever could measure even the Hawking-radiation. It is very far from any experimental possibility. And it is not very strong even theoretically.

Google for Hawking radiation, black hole evaporation, the wikipedia has a lot of nice, high school-level formulas for it.

peterh
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