FINALLY: evidence for Hawking's AREA THEOREM of black holes

AD | Click this link https://boot.dev/?promo=DRBECKY and use my code  DRBECKY  to get 25% off your first payment for boot.dev | Hawking is a name that will forever be linked with black holes. You think black holes, you think Stephen Hawking. Because in a time when many in science were still dismissing the idea of such a weird thing as an object collapsed under gravity so dense that light couldn’t escape, that seemed so counterintuitive to everything else we knew in physics, Hawking was bringing together the pieces to reveal how black holes could exist in nature, and how they would still obey the laws of physics despite their oddity. One of those laws is called the Hawking area theorem, and this month a research paper from the LIGO collaboration came out studying the gravitational waves from the merger of two black holes that provided the strongest evidence yet we have in support of Hawking’s black hole theorems…

P.S. This video was filmed before I started my chemotherapy treatment recently. I'm doing ok ❤️‍🩹

00:00 Introduction
03:00 What is the Hawking Area Theorem?
07:38 How we can test the theorem by detecting gravitational waves
10:27 What the LIGO collaboration found studying the GW250114 detection
15:21 Bloopers

LIGO collaboration (2025; GW250114) - https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...
LIGO collaboration (2015; GW150914) - https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...
LIGO collaboration (2016; GW150914) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.03840
Isi et al. (2021; hawking area theorem test with GW150914) - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.04486
Hawking & Penrose (1974) - https://www.jstor.org/stable/2416467?...
Hawking (1971) - https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract...
Bardeen, Carter & Hawking (1973) - https://link.springer.com/article/10....
Hawking (1974) - https://www.nature.com/articles/248030a0
Hawking (1976) - https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract...



Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV
Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: https://www.fiverr.com/mgs_editing

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👩🏽‍💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford (Christ Church). I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.


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