Stephen Hawking published his landmark paper on black-hole radiation in 1974. The short Nature paper, titled “Black hole explosions?”, introduced the idea now known as Hawking radiation.
The paper argued that quantum effects near a black hole’s event horizon allow black holes to emit particles with a thermal distribution. This overturned the simple classical picture that nothing could escape from a black hole. Because the radiation carries energy away, the black hole should gradually lose mass and, in theory, eventually evaporate.
Hawking’s result connected general relativity, quantum theory and thermodynamics. The popular explanation involving particle pairs near the event horizon is useful as an analogy, but the full derivation relies on quantum field theory in curved spacetime. The radiation from ordinary stellar-mass black holes would be extraordinarily faint, so it has not been directly observed from an astrophysical black hole. Hawking’s 1974 paper nevertheless became one of the foundational results of modern theoretical physics.