My understanding of Hawking radiation is that virtual particles, whose lifetimes are dictated by the Uncertainty principle, can form outside the event horizon of a black hole, allowing one of the pair to exit the black hole while the other is swallowed up.
As a result, there can be a net loss of mass in the black hole. After the fact this might seem pretty obvious but it contradicted the initial understanding of black holes; that is, that once mass entered a black hole it could never get out.
Like many breakthrough scientific discoveries, once they are understood the principles are sometimes simple enough to teach them to high school students, making such discoveries seem less than the breakthroughs that they are.
Cool thing is, no one knows if black holes are real.
Black holes are fantasy, we don’t know they exist. Big Bang is fantasy as are inflation, abiogenesis, and other theories in the evolution realm, the modern fairy tale for adults, based on vivid imagination, unprovable assumptions, biased interpretation, outlandish speculation that violate the laws of science.
We don’t even know how a star forms. That’s fact. Oh the science rags, community will rave about this and that, but at heart, it’s never been witnessed or adequately explained.
Hawking is another evolution dysphoria monkey cult member, the foolish scoffers who deny a Creator imagining they came from nothing, zillions and zillions of years ago, then out of a rock, then out of monkey to humanity and then call it science, promoted in our schools and propagandized to the extent of intellectual fascism.