Did We Just See a Black Hole Explode?

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IIn 2023, a neutrino telescope submerged deep in the Mediterranean Sea discovered quantum gold, detecting a neutrino with an energy 100,000 times greater than even the Large Hadron Collider, Earth’s most powerful particle accelerator, can produce. Simply put, it seemed like an impossible event. Now, physicists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst think the particle could be evidence of a black hole explosion that appeared at the beginning of time.

Ordinary black holes are created when old stars collapse and die, but Stephen Hawking speculated that another type of black hole might have appeared shortly after the Big Bang, before stars existed. Called “primordial black holes” (PBHs), these cosmic dinosaurs are believed to have formed from densely packed pockets of subatomic matter when the universe was in its infancy.

PBHs are thought to be smaller and lighter than ordinary black holes, and capable of emitting radiation that could eventually lead to an explosion.

“The lighter a black hole, the hotter it should be and the more particles it will emit,” Andrea Thamm, co-author of the new research published in Physical Examination Lettersexplained in a press release. “As PBHs evaporate, they become lighter and lighter and therefore hotter, emitting even more radiation in an uncontrollable process until they explode. It is this Hawking radiation that our telescopes can detect.”

Read more: “The black sheep of black holes”

Observing such an explosion could reveal the secrets of the universe. Like breaking a cosmic piñata, a PBH explosion would reveal every subatomic particle in existence, including those that only exist in theory, like dark matter and energy.

So, was the 2023 superneutrino a remnant of a PBH explosion?

Unfortunately, there was a small complication. A second neutrino telescope, IceCube, buried in the ice at the South Pole, did not detect any highly charged neutrinos or even anything nearby. If, as the UMass Amherst team theorized earlier, PBH explosions occur frequently in the universe, why didn’t IceCube detect them?

“We think that PBHs with a ‘dark charge’ – what we call quasi-extremal PBHs – are the missing link,” said study co-author Joaquim Iguaz Juan. This “dark charge” is basically the same as the electric force, but instead of an ordinary electron, it is carried by a theoretical heavier particle that the team calls a “dark electron.”

“There are other, simpler models of PBH,” added study co-author Michael Baker. “Our dark charge model is more complex, which means it can provide a more accurate model of reality. What’s really cool is seeing that our model can explain this otherwise inexplicable phenomenon.”

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Main image: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

• Jake Currie

  Published on February 5, 2026

  Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, New York.