Physicists at Radbod University in the Netherlands have shown that Stephen Hawking was right about black holes eventually disappearing through evaporation, but the event horizon is not as important in this process as previously thought. Gravity and the curvature of space-time itself also produce Hawking radiation, which evaporates all sufficiently massive objects in the universe. This is reported in an article published in the arXiv preprint repository.

According to Hawking, pairs of virtual particles and antiparticles are spontaneously born and annihilate near the event horizon. Sometimes one particle from a pair falls below the event horizon, as a result of which the pair ceases to be virtual, and the other particle can fly away, forming radiation. According to the law of conservation of mass, radiation causes a black hole to lose mass (evaporate). In the new work, it was shown that the event horizon is not necessary for particle generation.

It was previously believed that Hawking radiation was impossible without an event horizon, but the very curvature of space-time created by a body of large mass plays a large role in the generation of particles that are separated by the tidal forces of the gravitational field. Since any large objects, such as the remnants of evolved stars, have enough mass to create the curvature of space-time, they also evaporate, as well as the Universe itself, which changes the view of its distant future.

Scientists note that this phenomenon should not give rise to an information paradox, according to which information about the state of particles in the composition of a space object is lost when it evaporates. To prove the conservation of information, further theoretical studies are needed regarding the entropy of the object and the thermal nature of the radiation. It has been previously shown that information in black holes should not really be lost, but no explanation has yet been proposed for how information can escape from a black hole when it evaporates.