When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.A speculative illustration of tiny primordial black holes. Have physicists just seen one explode?. | Credit: University of Massachusetts AmherstAn incredibly energetic “impossible” particle that hit Earth in 2023 may have been debris from an exploding primordial black hole formed during the Big Bang. If that is the case, then it could prove the existence of primordial black holes, which could then help explain what the universe’s most mysterious “stuff,” dark matter, is made of.The particle in question was a neutrino with an energy 100,000 times greater than that of the highest-energy particles produced by the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In fact, the particle was so energetic that scientists aren’t aware of any natural cosmic phenomena powerful enough to create it.AdvertisementAdvertisementNow, a team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst suggests that a particle like this could be blasted out when a so-called “quasi-extremal primordial black hole” explodes.The key to black hole explosions is the leaking of Hawking radiation, a type of thermal radiation named for physicist Stephen Hawking, who first proposed its existence in 1974. The hotter a black hole is, the quicker it leaks Hawking radiation, losing mass and then finally ending its life in a massive explosion.The catch is that the bigger a black hole is, the colder it is, and the more slowly it loses thermal radiation to its surroundings. Thus, even the smallest stellar mass black holes, born when massive stars go supernova at the end of their lives, would take about 10^67 years, vastly longer than the age of the universe, to leak enough radiation to reach this explosive stage.However, Hawking also theorized that another type of black hole may exist, one born not from the death of a star but directly from density fluctuations in the “primordial sea” of ultrahot particles that filled the cosmos during its first momen …
