黑洞会蒸发吗?

　　Famed theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking once predicted that black holes not only suck celestial objects into their depths but also emit particles into space. He theorized that these particles slowly strip black holes of their mass and energy, until eventually, the black hole disappears — but physicists never thought they could prove it.

　　著名理论物理学家兼宇宙学家斯蒂芬·霍金曾预言，黑洞不仅将天体吸入其深处，而且会向太空发射粒子。他的理论是，这些粒子会慢慢带走黑洞的质量和能量，直到黑洞最终消失——但物理学家从未想过他们能够证明这一点。

　　This year, however, a team of researchers finally spotted this elusive Hawking radiation in laboratory experiments. The team created a "waterfall" from a stream of extremely cold gas to model the event horizon of a black hole, the invisible boundary beyond which nothing can escape. Quantum sound waves fed into the gas could flow away from the waterfall if inserted into the "stream" nearby, but sound waves in the waterfall itself became trapped by the relentless current. The escaped sound waves can be seen as analogous to particles of light escaping the pull of a black hole, suggesting that Hawking's theory was right.

　　然而到了今年，一组研究人员终于在实验室的试验中发现了这种难以捉摸的霍金辐射。研究小组用一股极冷的气流创造了一个“瀑布”，用以模拟黑洞的事件视界(一种任何事物都无法逃脱的无形边界)。注入气体中的量子声波如果被插入附近的“流”中，就可能从瀑布中流走，但瀑布本身的声波却被无情的气流困住了。我们可以将这些逃逸的声波看作是黑洞中逸出的光粒子——这表明霍金的理论是正确的。