Facing steep funding cuts, scientists propose using black holes as particle colliders instead of building new ones on Earth

An artist's concept of a feeding supermassive black hole with a jet streaming outward at nearly the speed of light.

In the face of eye-watering costs, long construction times and the Trump administration's slashing of federal science funding, physicists have proposed a cheaper alternative to the next-generation of particle supercolliders — peering into black holes.

Scientists initially hoped that the elusive particles that make up dark matter would be spat out by high-energy proton collisions inside CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), yet so far no such detection has been made.