Abstract

Black holes are hot. Heating of the ultra-dense core of a black hole by incoming particles of interstellar matter is sufficient to generate a quark-gluon plasma. This plasma, which can include particles ranging from photons, gluons, neutrinos and quarks to hadrons and beyond, could be regarded as the final product of the stellar collapse that led to formation of the black hole. Because the energy of neutrinos inside a black hole is quantized and the number of levels between the core and the event horizon is finite, excess neutrinos must either react with the core or escape through the event horizon. The escaping neutrinos could be among the high-energy neutrinos that have been detected by the IceCube experiment.

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