Hawking radiation. Conceptual illustration of a black hole with Hawking radiation. Stephen Hawking provided a theoretical argument for its existence in 1974. This radiation reduces the mass and energy of black holes. Pairs of particles and antiparticles are created by quantum fluctuations in the vacuum, and when this happens near the event horizon, the blue particle will be sucked up by the black hole, while the red one will make up the Hawking radiation.