More or less. In my layman’s understanding: Black holes ‘evaporate’ slowly through Hawking radiation, losing mass as a function of their surface area (simplistically, particle/anti-particle pairs ‘pop out of nothing’ near the event horizon, one gets swallowed up the other escapes, this means a net loss of energy, which has to ‘paid’ by the black hole losing mass, think E=mc^2^).
Since a black hole behaves (geometrically) like any other sphere, the proportion of its area to its volume will grow as the black hole loses mass (i.e. it will have more and more relative area the smaller it gets), this process speeds up over time thus ending in what I guess you could call an explosion (more a whimper than a bang, to borrow a phrase).
Part 2 of your question: We don’t know.
remon@ani.social 3 weeks ago
They don’t. They do evaporate though.
Lumidaub@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
That’s a hypothesis though, right? They haven’t detected any yet afaik (which the article could make clearer in its introduction).
remon@ani.social 3 weeks ago
Yeah, it mentions it at the end under the “Experimental observation” section.
Lumidaub@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Yes, I know, but realistically, many (most?) people just want brief, general information, which is what the introductory paragraph is for, no? So I’d argue it should say “hypothesised” or “predicted” somewhere in the, ideally, first sentence.