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Space
Space
Science
Robert Lea

Did astronomers see a black hole explode? An 'impossible' particle that hit Earth in 2023 may tell us

A speculative illustration of tiny primordial black holes. Have physicists just seen one explode?.

An incredibly energetic "impossible" particle that hit Earth in 2023 may have been debris from an exploding primordial black hole formed during the Big Bang. If that is the case, then it could prove the existence of primordial black holes, which could then help explain what the universe's most mysterious "stuff," dark matter, is made of.

The particle in question was a neutrino with an energy 100,000 times greater than that of the highest-energy particles produced by the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In fact, the particle was so energetic that scientists aren't aware of any natural cosmic phenomena powerful enough to create it.

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