Magic formula for Hawking radiation
Dr Biancalana and his students Mr Charles Robson and Leone Villari have discovered a new formula in Einstein’s theory of gravity, called General Relativity, that is able to determine exactly the temperature of Black Holes of any type. Black holes, very massive stars that trap light inside the so-called event horizon, should be at exactly zero temperature since nothing can escape the event horizon. However, in the 1970’s Stephen Hawking discovered that due to quantum mechanics, the curvature of spacetime allows quantum fluctuations to create particles and radiation that can escape the horizon, giving them an extremely small but non vanishing temperature. Now Dr Biancalana and his team used methods based on topology to produce a formula that is universal and can be applied to any type of normal or exotic black holes and spacetimes. One of the surprising features of this “magic formula” is that it uses only two dimensions, one dimension of time and one of space. The true fundamental meaning of this formula is still unknown, and the team is trying to determine what it can tells us about the fundamental building blocks of spacetime.