This man created a 'black hole' in a lab to prove a decades-old Stephen Hawking theory

Black holes remain one of space's greater scientific mysteries, but thanks to the artificial replication of the phenomenon in a lab, we could be a step closer to understanding their strange radiation, first described by Stephen Hawking decades ago.

Independent experimental physicist Jeff Steinhauer of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa created an artificial black hole that appears to emit the so-called "Hawking radiation," named for a theory proposed by Hawking in the mid-1970s. Using ultracold atoms, Steinhauer appeared to be able to mimic a black hole's "event horizon," or "the point beyond which the gravitational pull is too strong for even light to escape," Nature explains. The resulting "artificial black hole" Steinhauer created seems to emit a form of the Hawking radiation:

Others say experiments in a lab don't explain much about real black holes. "This experiment, if all statements hold, is really amazing," Silke Weinfurtner, a theoretical and experimental physicist at the University of Nottingham, U.K., told Nature. "It doesn't prove that Hawking radiation exists around astrophysical black holes."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Read more about the experiment, as well as a detailed explanation of Hawking's theory, in Nature.