A brief history of time - Stephen Hawking [50]
Of course, if a black hole as close as Pluto were to reach the end of its life and blow up, it would be easy to detect the final burst of emission. But if the black hole has been emitting for the last ten or twenty thousand million years, the chance of it reaching the end of its life within the next few years, rather than several million years in the past or future, is really rather small! So in order to have a reasonable chance of seeing an explosion before your research grant ran out, you would have to find a way to detect any explosions within a distance of about one light-year. In fact bursts of gamma rays from space have been detected by satellites originally constructed to look for violations of the Test Ban Treaty. These seem to occur about sixteen times a month and to be roughly uniformly distributed in direction across the sky. This indicates that they come from outside the Solar System since otherwise we would expect them to be concentrated toward the plane of the orbits of the planets. The uniform distribution also indicates that the sources are either fairly near to us in our galaxy or right outside it at cosmological distances because otherwise, again, they would be concentrated toward the plane of the galaxy. In the latter case, the energy required to account for the bursts would be far too high to have been produced by tiny black holes, but if the sources were close in galactic terms, it might be possible that they were exploding black holes. I would very much like this to be the case but I have to recognize that there are other possible explanations for the gamma ray bursts, such as colliding neutron stars. New observations in the next few years, particularly by gravitational wave detectors like LIGO, should enable us to discover the origin of the gamma ray bursts.
Even if the search for primordial black holes proves negative, as it seems it may, it will still give us important information about the very early stages of the universe. If the early universe had been chaotic or irregular, or if the pressure of matter had been low, one would have expected it to produce many more primordial black holes than the limit already set by our observations of the gamma ray background. Only if the early universe was very smooth and uniform, with a high pressure, can one explain the absence of observable numbers of primordial black holes.
The idea of radiation from black holes was the first example of a prediction that depended in an essential way on both the great theories of this century, general relativity and quantum mechanics. It aroused a lot of opposition initially because it upset the existing viewpoint: “How can a black hole emit anything?” When I first announced the results of my calculations at a conference at the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, I was greeted with general incredulity. At the end of my talk the chairman of the session, John G. Taylor from Kings College, London, claimed it was all nonsense. He even wrote a paper to that effect. However, in the end most people, including John Taylor, have come to the conclusion that black holes must radiate like hot bodies if our other ideas about general relativity and quantum mechanics are correct. Thus, even though we have not yet managed to find a primordial black hole, there is fairly general agreement that if we did, it would have to be emitting a lot of gamma rays and X rays.
The existence of radiation from black holes seems to imply that gravitational collapse is not as final and irreversible as we once thought. If an astronaut falls into a black hole, its mass will increase, but eventually the energy equivalent of that extra mass will be returned to the universe in the form of radiation. Thus, in a sense, the astronaut