Can a black hole explode? - Livescience.com

But could black holes actually have more interesting interior lives.

As long as a black hole isn't sucking in new material, it will slowly lose mass as it emits Hawking radiation.

A normal black hole with a mass a few times that of the sun emits approximately one photon, or packet of light, every year.

But Hawking realized that smaller black holes evaporate much more quickly.

As a black hole gets smaller and smaller, it emits more and more radiation.

In the last moments of its life, the black hole emits so much radiation, so quickly that it effectively acts like a bomb, releasing a torrent of high-energy radiation and particles.

If small black holes (about the size of Earth) formed in the extremely early universe, they would take a few billion years to evaporate, meaning that these "primordial" black holes, if they exist, would be exploding all over the universe right now.

To date astronomers have not found any evidence of exploding primordial black holes, but they could be out there.

Anything that falls toward the spinning black hole begins to orbit around it as the particle enters the ergosphere.

The rotating space-time around a black hole can also pull on photons.

If enough photons participate in the process, they can all come bursting out at once with incredible energy, becoming what's known as a "black hole bomb." Even though the black hole itself doesn't explode, this superradiant effect once again shows just how powerfully black holes can affect their environment.

Besides shredding up stars, these giant black holes frequently collect swarms of matter that constantly swirl around them in giant accretion disks.

At their most powerful, the disks wind up electric and magnetic fields that funnel some of the disk material around the black holes and out in the form of long, thin jets that reach for tens of thousands of light-years.