system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why does Hawking radiation not have an equal chance of increasing or decreasing the mass of a black hole, causing no net change?

As far as I understand, Hawking radiation is caused when a particle/antiparticle pair forms outside a black hole, and one of them is sucked in. However, shouldn't this have the opposite effect depending on whether the particle or the antiparticle falls in?
gpt
Remember that **both** the particle and antiparticle have *positive mass* so the change in the black hole's mass is not because something with negative mass falls in.

The reason the black hole loses mass is because for the pair of particles, one has positive and the other has negative energy. The positive energy particle leaves and the negative energy particle falls into the black hole. It does not matter whether it is matte ror antimatter.

That it is the positive particle who escapes is obviously not a coincidence as you need positive energy to escape the gravitational influence of the black hole in the first place.