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Hawking radiation doesn't require decay. Pairs of particles appear spontaneously. One falls into the gravitational field, losing energy.

The net energy loss comes from the gravitational field of the object, and its mass decreases. We don't have details on just what that means at a Standard Model level, but the net loss of energy means something is going to disappear even without any kind of previously understood decay.



> Pairs of particles appear spontaneously. One falls into the gravitational field, losing energy.

That's not really true. Even Hawking admitted that's it's a simplification he did for his popular science book of what really is going on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxVssUb0MsA


Hawking never knew "what really is going on". He wrote some nice hypotheses, but he never knew for sure, and was not ever close to knowing.


But he did know the simplification was wrong.




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