Tiny, exploding black holes might explain one of the biggest mysteries about how the universe, in its current form, came to be.
In the cosmos, matter is much more common than antimatter. But scientists don’t know how matter achieved its dominance. Now, a team of physicists reports that matter’s takeover may have involved tiny black holes, born in the first instants after the Big Bang. Those hypothetical primordial black holes would have quickly evaporated and exploded, sending shock waves careening outward. That could have set the stage for matter to take over, physicist Alexandra Klipfel reported in March at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit.
Scientists believe that the universe formed with equal amounts of matter and antimatter. But matter and antimatter annihilate when they meet. Without something to tip the scales, the universe would have been featureless, containing pure energy. The tiny black holes could have shifted the balance to produce our matter-rich cosmos, enabling the formation of the stars, planets and galaxies within it.
If that’s true, it would give scientists a handle on black holes that would otherwise be very hard to study, says theoretical physicist Lucien Heurtier of King’s College London, who was not involved with the research. “It’s very difficult to detect their existence in cosmology because they are gone. They have been gone for a while.”
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