Stephen Hawking predicts that black holes radiate

In a paper published in Nature in March 1974, the British physicist Stephen Hawking showed by combining quantum mechanics with general relativity that black holes, long thought to emit nothing, should glow slightly with thermal radiation, because of quantum effects near the event horizon, and so lose mass and eventually evaporate. A black hole the mass of the Sun would have a temperature of only about 60 billionths of a kelvin, so the effect is far too small to observe. It raised the black-hole information paradox, which is still debated. Hawking radiation is the best-known result of his career, and the formula for it is carved on his memorial stone in Westminster Abbey; he died in 2018.

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