(Web Desk) - Black holes are some of the most violent and destructive objects in the universe.
And as terrifying as it sounds, thousands of these mysterious voids could be whizzing through your home at this very moment.
Scientists believe the universe may be littered with objects called primordial black holes.
According to some calculations, as many as 1,000 could be passing through every square metre of the planet each year.
One of these black holes might even blast straight through your head, without you ever knowing it was there.
Primordial black holes are ancient entities formed in the very first moments of the Big Bang, which have been drifting through the universe ever since.
However, these are not the star-swallowing, galaxy-churning supermassive black holes that appear in science-fiction blockbusters like Interstellar.
Instead, they are microscopic singularities no larger than a hydrogen atom, ranging from the mass of a single bacterium to that of a medium-sized asteroid.
Typically, black holes form when a star with a lot of mass collapses in on itself until it forms an ultra-dense point known as a singularity.
These points of matter have such a strong gravitational pull that even light is pulled in - hence why they appear 'black'.
However, primordial black holes might form in a slightly different way.
In fact, these would have formed so early on in the universe that stars wouldn't have even had time to form.
Dr De-Chang Dai, a black hole researcher from Yangzhou University, China, told MailOnline: 'Primordial black holes are black holes created soon after the Big Bang.
'At this period, the temperature and energy density of the universe were very high.'
So, when small pockets of 'overdense' matter formed, this high energy squished them into very small black holes.