Researchers May Have Found Evidence of Stephen Hawking's 'Unproven Primordial Black Hole Theory' at the Bottom of the Sea
Stephen Hawking was an exemplary scholar who provided multiple illuminating theories. One of his theories, which has remained unproven to this date, appears to have garnered some validity, stated Live Science. Findings regarding this new development on the unproven theory have been published in arXiv.
Around five decades ago Hawking postulated that the Big Bang event crowded the universe with several tiny black holes. Researchers believe that one of those black holes has now exploded. In February 2025, underwater detectors located off the coasts of France, Italy, and Greece detected what experts believed to be a powerful neutrino. The particle was estimated to have an energy of around 100 PeV. This is 25 times more energy than what is produced by a particle accelerated in the Large Hadron Collider, the world's most powerful atom smasher.
Researchers were surprised by the finding because such an energetic neutrino should not have existed theoretically. The experts associated with the study hypothesize that the neutrino was possibly the outcome of an evaporating black hole. This theory of evaporating black holes was also proposed by Hawking. In the 1970s, Hawking claimed that black holes were made out of complex interactions between quantum fields of space-time and black hole event horizon. These interactions possibly cause a steady radiation which was named Hawking radiation. This implies black holes undergo evaporation before eventually vanishing.
The study claims that as the size of the black hole gets smaller, more radiation comes forth. Eventually, the black hole comes to a state where it explodes and produces several high-energy particles, like the neutrino located underwater. The catch is that the sizes of all known black holes cannot cause a neutrino of such energy. As per estimates, for a black hole to produce such a neutrino, it should be around 22,000 pounds (10,000 kilograms), which is comparatively smaller than typical black holes.
Such small black holes can only be produced during the events that took place amidst the early Big Bang. Black holes produced in such circumstances are called 'primordial' black holes. The smallest black holes that were possibly cultivated during the Big Bang have exploded long ago, according to researchers. Only the large ones now survive. The 22,000 pounds black hole should also not have survived this long, but the study claimed an additional quantum mechanism — known as "memory burden" possibly allowed the black hole to not undergo decay at the typical rate. This caused the supposed primordial black hole to survive for billions of years and only explode recently. This explosion in turn formed a high-energy neutrino which was spotted by underwater detectors.
Primordial black holes further validate the existence of dark matter. Certain experts speculate that dark matter is an invisible substance that makes up most of the matter in the universe. However, researchers have yet to discover this dark matter. Researchers believe that the primordial black holes of this mass make up the dark matter, and if so are exploding regularly. The study claims that if their assertion is correct Earth will witness another energized neutrino.