Astronomers think a black hole may explode soon

(Web Desk) - For half a century, black hole fireworks have lived mostly in theory. The standard picture holds that if black holes ever “explode,” it is vanishingly rare – maybe once every 100,000 years somewhere in the universe – and far beyond our reach to witness.

A new analysis flips that expectation on its head. Physicists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst argue there’s better than a nine-in-ten chance that an observable black hole outburst will occur in the next ten years.

The team noted that our existing array of space- and ground-based telescopes is already capable of seeing it.

Black holes that can explode

The scenario hinges on a particular class of black hole first proposed by Stephen Hawking in 1970: primordial black holes (PBHs).

Unlike their heavyweight cousins born from the deaths of massive stars, PBHs could have formed in the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang. During that time, extreme density ripples compressed pockets of the early universe.

Crucially, a PBH can be far lighter than a stellar black hole. And the lighter a black hole is, the hotter it becomes, slowly bleeding energy as particles via Hawking radiation.

As it shrinks, it heats up even more in a runaway process that ends in a final, brilliant outburst. This outburst is a flash of particles and high-energy light that, in principle, we can detect.

That last part has been the sticking point. If PBHs exist, why haven’t we seen one go off? The prevailing wisdom has been that the odds are simply too small on human timescales.

The UMass Amherst team revisited one of the field’s quiet assumptions: that primordial black holes carry no electric charge.

In their work, they explore a “dark QED” toy model – an analog of electromagnetism that includes a very heavy, hypothetical cousin of the electron, sometimes called a dark electron.

If PBHs formed with even a tiny amount of this dark electric charge, the researchers show, the charge could temporarily stabilize the black hole’s evaporation. That pause delays the finale, so more PBHs would be reaching their terminal phase now.

With all current experimental constraints folded in, their calculations shift the expected cadence of observable PBH explosions from “about once every hundred millennia” to “roughly once per decade.”

“We’re not claiming it’s guaranteed, but the probability may be as high as 90% that one occurs within the next ten years,” said Baker.