  Ever since the discovery of black hole evaporation, the region of origin of
the radiated quanta has been a topic of debate. Recently it was argued by
Giddings that the Hawking quanta originate from a region well outside the black
hole horizon by calculating the effective radius of a radiating body via the
Stefan--Boltzmann law. In this paper we try to further explore this issue and
end up corroborating this claim, using both a heuristic argument and a detailed
study of the stress energy tensor. We show that the Hawking quanta originate
from what might be called a quantum atmosphere around the black hole with
energy density and fluxes of particles peaked at about $4M$, running contrary
to the popular belief that these originate from the ultra high energy
excitations very close to the horizon. This long distance origin of Hawking
radiation could have a profound impact on our understanding of the information
and transplanckian problems.
