Did We Just See a Black Hole Explode?
upstart writes:
Cosmic mystery of the impossibly high-energy neutrino solved by "dark charge" model of black holes :
In 2023, a subatomic particle called a neutrino crashed into Earth with an impossibly huge amount of energy. In fact, no known sources anywhere in the universe can produce that much energy, 100,000 times more than the highest-energy particle ever produced by the Large Hadron Collider, Earth's most powerful particle accelerator. However, a team of physicists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst recently hypothesized that something like this could happen when a special kind of black hole, called a quasi-extremal primordial black hole, explodes.
Black holes exist, and we have a good understanding of their life cycle: an old, large star runs out of fuel, implodes in a massively powerful supernova, and leaves behind an area of spacetime with such intense gravity that nothing, not even light, can escape. These black holes are incredibly heavy and are essentially stable.
But, as physicist Stephen Hawking pointed out in 1970, another kind of black hole - a primordial black hole - could be created not by the collapse of a star, but from the universe's primordial conditions shortly after the Big Bang. Primordial black holes exist only in theory so far. And, like standard black holes, they're so massively dense that almost nothing can escape them ... which is what makes them black. However, despite their density, primordial black holes could be much lighter than the black holes we have so far observed. Furthermore, Hawking showed that primordial black holes could slowly emit particles via what is now known as Hawking radiation if they got hot enough.
Andrea Thamm, co-author of the new research and assistant professor of physics at UMass Amherst, said:
The lighter a black hole is, the hotter it should be and the more particles it will emit. As primordial black holes 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.
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