Black holes have a reputation for swallowing everything in sight. But physicists now say there’s a 90% chance one will explode in the next decade, and we may finally get to watch.
A team at the University of Massachusetts Amherst believes the blast could confirm how black holes die. It would also back up an idea Stephen Hawking proposed in 1974, that black holes slowly leak energy through what’s known as Hawking radiation until they collapse in one last burst.
“We would also get a definitive record of every particle that makes up everything in the Universe,” said Joaquim Iguaz Juan, an astrophysicist at UMass Amherst. “It would completely revolutionize physics and help us rewrite the history of the Universe.”
For years, astronomers assumed these explosions were too rare ever to witness, maybe one every 100,000 years. But new modeling suggests they might happen often enough that our current detectors could catch one every ten years.
Physicists Say There’s a 90% Chance We’ll Watch a Black Hole Explode Within a Decade
That possibility hinges on primordial black holes, the small ones thought to have formed in the first moments after the Big Bang. Instead of swallowing stars whole, they’d be about the size of asteroids, and unlike the supermassive beasts at the centers of galaxies, they would burn out on a timeline humans can actually grasp.
Andrea Thamm, another physicist at UMass, explained that the lighter a black hole is, the hotter it becomes and the more particles it spits out. As it sheds mass, that process accelerates until the black hole finally blows apart.
The team’s work introduced a wrinkle involving a hypothetical “dark electron.” This particle could have allowed some primordial black holes to last longer before reaching their explosive finale. If the idea holds, a few of them may only now be ready to go off.
What makes this so important isn’t just the fireworks. When one finally explodes, it should release a complete set of particles, from the ones we already know to the ones we suspect exist, and maybe even the ones no one has ever imagined. For scientists, it would be the ultimate deep dive into the building blocks of the Universe.
If the odds are right, the first black hole death we ever see could happen within the decade. Not bad for a phenomenon once thought to be so rare that no human eye would ever catch it.
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