I was bopping around YouTube and observed this enjoyably produced video. In it, when describing the behavior of a black hole with the mass of a US nickel, the narrator says, "Its 5 grams of mass will be converted to 450 terajoules of energy, which will lead to an explosion roughly three times bigger than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined."
Of all the fun things illustrated there, that was the one whose pretense I didn't understand. Do black holes explode after they've radiated away all of their mass? Or would the "explosion" just come from the rapid pace at which the black hole would consume nearby matter?
The Googling I've done thus far has provided no firm answer. The closest I've come is from the Wikipedia page on Hawking Radiation, which states, "For a black hole of one solar mass, we get an evaporation time of 2.098 × 10^67 years—much longer than the current age of the universe at 13.799 ± 0.021 x 10^9 years. But for a black hole of 10^11 kg, the evaporation time is 2.667 billion years. This is why some astronomers are searching for signs of exploding primordial black holes."
Some other websites refer to the last "explosion" of the Milky Way's supermassive black hole being some 2 million years ago, but is that the same mechanic mentioned on the Wikipedia page? Or the YouTube video, for that matter?