"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."
"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.""
Black holes form from dying stars but can also originate as primordial black holes created during the Big Bang. Hawking radiation causes black holes to lose mass slowly, with tiny black holes evaporating far faster and becoming hotter. Very small primordial black holes could reach temperatures that lead to intense bursts of particle emission or explosive evaporation. Such explosions would release high-energy particles, including neutrinos, that could be detected on Earth. A powerful neutrino collision recorded in 2023 could be consistent with an evaporating primordial black hole. Primordial black holes remain undetected and are considered as potential dark matter candidates.
Read at Futurism
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]