O.o!
The epic collision between two neutron stars in 2017 really is the science gift that keeps on giving. As they merged, gravitational waves rippled out across the Universe; now reverberations from that event could confirm a decades-old hypothesis about black holes.
Astronomers poring over the gravitational wave data believe they have found evidence of echoes — something that would only occur in the presence of the ‘quantum fuzz’ produced by Hawking radiation.
“According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, nothing can escape from the gravity of a black hole once it has passed a point of no return, known as the event horizon,” said astronomer and physicist Niayesh Afshordi of the University of Waterloo in Canada.