Dr Steinhauer and his colleagues have not yet detected sonic Hawking radiation, but they have taken the first step: they have produced a dumb hole.

ECONOMIST: Black holes on a desktop: Dumb insolence | The

Nevertheless, with the LHC not scheduled to re-open for testing until the autumn and, even after that, not guaranteed to produce any black holes there is a good chance that the first Hawking radiation observed will be of a sort that even Dr Hawking never conceived of in his wildest dreams.

ECONOMIST: Black holes on a desktop

The Brown researcher thinks the particles are disappearing into the fireball's core and reappearing as thermal radiation, just as matter is thought to fall into a black hole and come out as "Hawking" radiation.

BBC: Artist's representation of a black hole,

As Stephen Hawking has demonstrated, black holes eventually evaporate in a burst of radiation.

ECONOMIST: Cosmology