Back in the early 2000s I gave a public talk called “Seven Ways a Black Hole Can Kill You.” Despite the rather macabre subject matter, it was actually a fun talk—real science disguised as a tongue-in-cheek series of cartoonish astrophysical antics. I covered the usual topics, including simply falling into a black hole and getting spaghettified or being too close to the gamma-ray burst released when a new black hole is formed.
Now, though, I wish I had covered getting hit by a subatomic asteroid-mass black hole moving at a million kilometers per hour that was born in the first moments after the big bang—and being blasted by the ensuing shock wave as the black hole carves a narrow corridor through your body.
I mean, obviously that’s what would happen. At least, that’s the conclusion of research published in 2025 in the International Journal of Modern Physics D. It’s a rather unusual topic for a professional paper—the title is “Gravitational Effects of a Small Primordial Black Hole Passing through the Human Body”—but there are some actual scientific conclusions about black holes and even dark matter that can be drawn from the fact that, thankfully, we haven’t ever seen such a grisly event occur.
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