Hawking radiation (also known as Bekenstein-Hawking radiation) is a thermal radiation with a black body spectrum predicted to be emitted by black holes due to quantum effects. It is named after the physicist Stephen Hawking who provided the theoretical argument for its existence in 1974, and sometimes also after the physicist Jacob Bekenstein who predicted that black holes should have a finite, non-zero temperature and entropy. Hawking's work followed his visit to Moscow in 1973 where Soviet scientists Yakov Zeldovich and Alexander Starobinsky showed him that according to the quantum mechanical uncertainty principle, rotating black holes should create and emit particles.

The Hawking radiation process reduces the mass of the black hole and is therefore also known as black hole evaporation. Because Hawking radiation allows black holes to lose mass, black holes that lose more matter than they gain through other means are expected to dissipate, shrink, and ultimately vanish. Smaller micro black holes (MBHs) are predicted to be larger net emitters of radiation than larger black holes, and to shrink and dissipate faster.

Hawking's analysis became the first convincing insight into a possible theory of quantum gravity. However, the existence of Hawking radiation has never been observed. In June 2008, NASA launched the GLAST satellite, which will search for the terminal gamma-ray flashes expected from evaporating primordial black holes.

In speculative large extra dimension theories, CERN's Large Hadron Collider may be able to create micro black holes and observe their evaporation. Ground based observatories, such as the Pierre Auger (a research partner of The University of Utah Telescope array), might also be capable of detecting evaporating MBHs that would form in the upper atmosphere by the impact of high-speed protons, also known as cosmic rays. Recent results from the Pierre Auger now suggest that the highest energy protons (with energies of 1020 eV or higher) originate from nearby active galactic nuclei where they are accelerated and travel to earth for hundreds of millions of years at nearly the speed of light, and upon impact might create MBHs, allowing for observation of their evaporation.

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