22/01/2026
🌌 Physicists now say there is a serious chance we could witness a black hole explode within our lifetime—and it may rewrite the story of the universe.
A team at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has revisited how primordial black holes might behave and concludes there is more than a 90% chance that an exploding primordial black hole could be detected in the next 10 years. Such an event would mark the first direct observation of both Hawking radiation and a primordial black hole, objects thought to have formed less than a second after the 13.8‑billion‑year‑old Big Bang.
The key lies in Hawking radiation: as a black hole loses mass, it heats up and emits more particles in a runaway process, ending in a brief, intense explosion that current ground- and space-based telescopes should be able to see as a sharp flash. The team explores a “dark‑QED toy model” in which primordial black holes carry a tiny dark electric charge, temporarily stabilizing them before their final outburst.
Catching such an explosion would provide a one-time inventory of all fundamental particles, from known species to dark matter candidates, offering an unprecedented testbed for high‑energy physics and cosmology.
📄 RESEARCH PAPER
📌 Michael J. Baker et al., “Could We Observe an Exploding Black Hole in the Near Future?”, Physical Review Letters (2025)
