A Discovery At The Bottom Of The Sea Might Prove The Black Hole Theory Stephen Hawking Came Up With
More than 50 years ago, astrophysicist Stephen Hawking theorized that the Big Bang created tiny black holes within the universe. Now, researchers believe they have just witnessed one explode.
Last month, the European collaboration of KM3NeT, underwater detectors off the coasts of Greece, Italy, and France, announced the discovery of an extremely powerful neutrino.
It had the energy of around 100 PeV, which was over 25 times more energetic than the particles in the Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful atom smasher in the world.
Experts have struggled to come up with a logical explanation for such an energetic neutrino. A team of researchers who were not involved in the original detection have put forth an interesting hypothesis. They proposed the idea that the neutrino is what was leftover from an evaporating black hole.
Hawking realized that black holes were not entirely black in the 1970s. They can release a slow but steady stream of radiation, now known as Hawking radiation. This means that black holes evaporate and eventually vanish.
As a black hole shrinks, it releases even more radiation until it explodes into high-energy particles and radiation, like the recently observed neutrino.
However, all known black holes are large. They are at least a few times the mass of the sun and are often much larger.
So, it will take billions of years for even the smallest of them to die. If the KM3NeT neutrino resulted from an exploding black hole, the black hole has to be significantly smaller, somewhere around 22,000 pounds.
The only known way of potentially producing such tiny black holes was during the events of the Big Bang, which may have led to the creation of “primordial” black holes in the cosmos.
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The smallest of them would have exploded a long time ago, but the larger ones may have persisted to the present day.
But a 22,000-pound black hole should not have survived from the Big Bang until now, although the team did point out that an additional quantum mechanism known as “memory burden” could have let the black hole resist decay.
So, it would have been able to survive for billions of years before finally exploding and sending a high-energy neutrino toward Earth. The researchers estimate that similar neutrino events will be seen in the next few years if the hypothesis is accurate.
“KM3NeT has begun to probe a range of energy and sensitivity where detected neutrinos may originate from extreme astrophysical phenomena,” said Paschal Coyle, a researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research in France.
If additional detections do occur, it could lead to new discoveries in astrophysics, black holes, and dark matter. The paper was uploaded to the arXiv database and has not been officially published yet.
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