Hawking's theory is amazing but so is the technology of the experiment (or the 97,000 experiements that they actually performed). I guess you can call it a black hole analog, with phonons (quantum sound waves - news to me!).

What I don't understand is: "Hawking suggested pairs of photons could be separated, with one particle getting absorbed by the black hole and the other escaping into space. The absorbed photon has negative energy and subtracts energy in the form of mass from the black hole, while the escaped photon becomes Hawking radiation. From this alone, given enough time (much longer than the age of the universe), a black hole could completely evaporate away."

How could adding a photon subtract energy or mass from the black hole? Is that an anti-matter/anti-energy thing? So the absorbed anti-energy photon maybe combines with a photon in the black hole and ... disappears? Becomes nothing?!!

A lab grown black hole?? Why aren't we all dead? Who makes up this shit?

Going on what has be touted about 'Black Holes' then shouldn't even Lab produced one have started sucking everything around in to by now?

I feel like I missed something. Shouldn't "Scientists create black hole in lab" be big news all by itself? Did they really create a black hole, or something that mimics one for the purposes of testing Hawking's theory? This seems to be the key sentence:

"The researchers' lab-grown black hole was made of a flowing gas of approximately 8,000 rubidium atoms cooled to nearly absolute zero and held in place by a laser beam. They created a mysterious state of matter, known as a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC), which allows thousands of atoms to act together in unison as though they were a single atom."

Thousands of atoms acting together in unison doesn't seem like quite the same thing as a black hole to me. They then "created" an event horizon--though "simulated" seems like a more appropriate verb--with gases flowing at different speeds. If they had a real black hole, wouldn't it automatically have an event horizon?

Am I missing something?

Just wait till the first research assistant decides to touch one...........

They're learning more about black holes everyday.