Can black holes turn into white holes? It's not such a crazy idea, scientists say

The left half of the illustration shows a dark background with a splotch of orange toward the center. That splotch is blue on the right side, and the rest of the right side is blueish gray in the background.

New research suggests that black holes born during the Big Bang could live much longer than previously estimated. In fact, these tiny primordial black holes may live long enough to become energy-spewing white holes with the mass of a human eyebrow hair.

Primordial black holes are proposed to have formed through fluctuations in the incredibly hot and dense matter that filled the universe moments after the Big Bang. This is in contrast to stellar-mass or "astrophysical" black holes that are familiar to us the collapse of massive stars like the. Primordial black holes remain undetected and therefore hypothetical.