NASA
In February 2025, the European project KM3NeT discovered an incredibly powerful neutrinos
Half a century ago, the famous theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking suggested that the Big Bang could have created the universe fill in tiny black holes. At present, scientists do not rule out that they may have discovered traces of an explosion of such a black hole for the first time.
Underwater detectors of the KM3NeT project in France, Italy, and Greece detected neutrinos with a power of about 100 MeV, which is 25 times higher than the energy of particles accelerated in the Large Hadron Collider.
At present, a group of researchers who were not involved in the detection of the neutrino have suggested that it may be in the wake of a black hole which evaporates.
The research article has been uploaded to the arXiv database, but has not yet been peer-reviewed.
Back in the 70s of the last century, Hawking was the first to suggest that due to the complex interaction between event horizon and the quantum fields of space-time, black holes can emit a slow but constant stream of radiation, which was later called Hawking radiation. This means that such radiation eventually leads to the disappearance of the black hole.
In fact, it becomes smaller and smaller, A black hole releases more and more radiation until it explodes in the middle of a firestorm of high-energy particles similar to neutrinos detected by the KM3NeT collaboration. However, almost all the black holes known to astrophysicists are very large and much larger than our Sun. Even the smallest of them takes about 10¹ºº years to finally disappear.
If the following is found The KM3NeT neutrino is indeed the result of a black hole explosion, it should be much smaller, about 10 thousand kg, which is approximately equal to the weight of two African elephants compressed into a black hole smaller than an atom.
The only known way of the emergence of similar black holes there are chaotic events from the Big Bang that could have filled the Universe with tiny black holes. However, such tiny primary black holes should have exploded long ago and ceased to exist.
A black hole weighing about 10 thousand kilograms should not have survived to the present day. However, the authors of the scientific paper suggest the existence of an additional quantum mechanism called «memory burden». It can allow black holes to resist decay.
This mechanism could allow a tiny black hole to persist for many billions of years before it explodes, sending a high-energy neutrino toward Earth. The researchers also suggest that primary black holes may be an explanation for dark matter, which is believed to make up most of the matter in the universe.
The researchers believe that if primary black holes in this mass range are numerous enough to explain all dark matter, they should explode fairly regularly. According to their calculations, If this hypothesis is correct, then KM3NeT should see another stunning neutrino in the next few years.
The article was published in arXiv
Source: LiveScience