system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Where exactly at black holes does hawking radiation occur?

Apparently some say it occurs at the event horizon, others say much further away. I would've thought it's close to the "surface" of the mass. 
So let me start here. I assume that a black hole is a spherical piece of mass such as a neutron star, just denser, and massive enough to "capture" light as well as creating a no light zone around it. The more massive a black hole, the bigger this zone is. The more massive a black hole (bh), the less hawking radiation (hr).
Now my problem: If hr occurs at the event horizon, the virtual particle escaping it would need to travel close to the speed of light but would be a lot of energy for a random occurence with very little energy (?). 
If it occurs millions of km away and the escaping particle just barely hits just the distance from the bh where it's velocity would allow it to not instantly get dragged back, wouldnt it just go into orbit around the bh and then not be hr? (I realize we don't really know too much about virtual particle's interaction with gravity, or do we?)
Now the only logical way for hr to work for me is this; hr only occurs directly on the surface of the piece of mass. (not the event horizon) Virtual particles are not affected by gravity in any way. The virtual particle annihilating in the bh just happend to travel right into the surface when it was created while the other one just happend not to, because it went the other way and continues to do so beacause it's counter part found another counter part in the bh. In my theory black hole's surfaces are smaller, the more massive they are, because they attrack it's own mass more and don't care about density limitations. Meaning the less massive a bh, the more surface, the more likely one of these hr processes becomes, thus increasing hr effectively. This would explain exactly why more massive black holes have less hr and not more.
Sorry if it's dumb or obvious and I am not a native speaker, so sorry for ineffective or unclear language. Thanks for reading.
gpt
We don't have an exact physical picture of how Hawking radiation works (although we have the math).

Energy from the black hole excelerates one of the members of the virtual pair out into the universe. The black hole loses energy and mass if the member successfully escapes. The smaller the gravity well the more likely these particles are to escape.

Hawking radiation must be produced just outside the event horizon because all paths inside the event horizon lead to the singularity. It also must occur just on the "surface" of the event horizon. Any further out and both particles would simply annihilate as usual. This tells us that the edge of the event horizon must be very sharp, if there is a gradient it has to be very very small.