Abstract: | Small, quiescent black holes can be considered as candidates for the missing dark matter of the universe, and as the core energy source of ball lightning. By means of gravitational tunneling, unidirectional radiation is emitted from black holes in a process much attenuated from that of Hawking radiation, P, which has proven elusive to detect. Gravitational tunneling emission is similar to electric field emission of electrons from a metal in that a second body is involved which lowers the barrier and gives the barrier a finite rather than infinite width. Hawking deals with a single isolated black hole. The radiated power here is P ∝ e-2Δγ P, where e-2Δγ is the transmission probability. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date. |