Natural Sciences Active Updated Jul 16, 2026
A tabletop black hole recreates Hawking's radiation
Physicists led by Ulf Leonhardt at the Weizmann Institute built a black hole analogue inside a strand of optical fiber using a fast-moving light pulse, and detected Hawking radiation, the faint thermal glow theory predicts should leak from a black hole's edge, along with the elusive back-reaction of that glow feeding energy into the object producing it. The arc will run as researchers test whether the same physics scales toward anything closer to a real black hole or stays a lab-only effect.
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Jul 16, 2026 Latest
A team led by Ulf Leonhardt at the Weizmann Institute of Science built a black hole analogue in optical fiber and, publishing in Nature on July 1, detected both Hawking radiation and its back-reaction on the analogue for the first time, with the light showing a real temperature and a spectrum that held up even where standard black hole equations should have broken down.
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