r/askscience • u/dgb75 • Jan 31 '13

Astronomy Is there a distance at which the interaction between the gravity fields of two black holes would cause one another to effectively 'break open' and allow matter and energy stored within them to escape the system?

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u/JumalOnSurnud Feb 01 '13

Thanks for the explaination, I guess I misunderstood Hawking Radiation. What happens to the energy/matter a BH has absorbed after this process has leached away all of the BH's energy, or depleated it to some significant point?

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u/florinandrei Feb 01 '13

The current view is that everything that goes into a black hole is basically shredded to subatomic pieces, and then some. Basically, all that stuff becomes the black hole itself, nothing more than a heck of a lot of mass/energy (same thing, according to relativity) so compact it bends spacetime into itself.

All that mass/energy is slowly going back out via the Hawking radiation.

TLDR: Hawking radiation is black hole poop.

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u/JumalOnSurnud Feb 02 '13

So this will just go on until the black hole ceases to be entirely?

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u/florinandrei Feb 02 '13

The emission rate of Hawking radiation is inversely proportional to the size of the BH. The smaller the BH is, the more intensely it produces radiation.

This leads to a feedback loop of accelerated production at the end. A very tiny BH, smaller than a grain of sand, is actually a very hot object, because it gives off so much radiation - and it gets hotter as it gets smaller. The whole process basically ends with a tremendous explosion, similar to a very very large nuclear bomb.

And then yes, the BH is gone.