Black holes are born from the explosive deaths of stars. But can black holes themselves explode? Nobody knows for sure — but if they can, a team of scientists argue they may have spotted evidence of such a catastrophe taking place.
Their study, published in Physical Review Letters, suggests that the impossibly powerful collision of a subatomic particle called a neutrino into the Earth detected in 2023 could be explained by the explosion of a special kind of cosmic object called a primordial black hole.
Black holes have expiration dates. It’s just that their lifespan is so long unbelievably long that there simply hasn’t been enough time to see one wink out. In 1974, Stephen Hawking hypothesized that the objects slowly release energy due to strange quantum effects near their event horizons. This slow trickle of energy is now called Hawking radiation, with modern calculations estimating it would take a time period of quadrillions upon quadrillions of times longer than the current age of the Universe for a black hole to completely “evaporate.”
But Hawking also theorized that black holes could also come in the form of primordial black holes, formed not from the death of a star, but from the extreme conditions that existed mere instants after the Big Bang. The cosmos should be swarming in these, but none have ever been detected. Perhaps that’s because they could theoretically be as small as an atom, and their elusiveness has led to them being a potential candidate for dark matter, the invisible substance thought to account for roughly 85 percent of all mass in the cosmos.
Yet it turns out that lighter black holes could also explode, releasing detectable outburst of particles, according to the researchers.
“The lighter a black hole is, the hotter it should be and the more particles it will emit,” coauthor Andrea Thamm, assistant professor of physics at UMass Amherst, said in a statement about the work. “As PBHs evaporate, they become ever lighter, and so hotter, emitting even more radiation in a runaway process until explosion. It’s that Hawking radiation that our telescopes can detect.”
That leads us back to our puzzling neutrino that collided with Earth in 2023. It released more energy than thought possible for any one particle to emit. One explanation is that this was a fluke or error, since it wasn’t detected by other observatories. The non-boring answer, however, is that this was the work of a primordial black hole imbued with a “dark charge,” a hypothetical twin to the conventional electrical force that’s driven by a “dark electron.”
“A PBH with a dark charge,” explained Thamm, “has unique properties and behaves in ways that are different from other, simpler PBH models. We have shown that this can provide an explanation of all of the seemingly inconsistent experimental data.”
It’s a very fringe and esoteric explanation. But it does come with the added bonus of explaining another big cosmological mystery.
“If our hypothesized dark charge is true,” coauthor Joaquim Iguaz Juan , a physics researcher at UMass Amherst, said in the statement, “then we believe there could be a significant population of PBHs, which would be consistent with other astrophysical observations, and account for all the missing dark matter in the universe.”
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