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First "Observation" of Hawking Radiation
KentuckyFC writes "Italian physicists are claiming the first observation of Hawking radiation, but not from a black hole. Instead they've spotted it streaming from a sonic horizon in a Bose Einstein Condensate (abstract on the arXiv). That's consistent with previous predictions but they're claiming the 'first' even though the experiment was only a numerical simulation. Does that really count?"
My first thought from the headline was Unruh effect. It's a kind of Hawking radiation you can get in a particle accelerator. It just happens that with black holes, the acceleration is due to gravity, but other sources of acceleration also work. There are huge decelerations from c to nearly 0 at heavy ion collisions, for example.
I first heard of the effect when some fellow physicists were considering the idea of tiny black holes created in particle physics experiments. It turned out that the presence of Hawking-like radiation doesn't necessarily mean a black hole.
Well, it also turns out that this has nothing directly to do with the article, but might be +i, interesting nevertheless.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.