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Black Hole Spewing Energy

Posted by timothy on Tuesday October 23, 2001 @02:43PM from the very-fabric-of-space dept.

dragoness.ai points to this story at space.com about some exciting news for black hole enthusiasts, writing "The scientists had a chance for the first time in history to observe energy coming out of a black hole."

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Re:Hawking by krlynch · 2001-10-24 05:14 · Score: 3, Insightful

Except for Hawking radiation

Actually, no. The quote was: "Never before have we seen energy extracted from a black hole". Since we have never seen the Hawking radiation emitted by any known black hole, this statement is true (we've also never seen energy extraction occur by the Penrose process); the Hawking temperature of any black hole currently observable would be lower than the cosmic background radiation temperature, and certainly orders of magnitude below the black hole's local thermal environment, that we would never have a prayer to observe the HR.