Primordial Explosions: Solving the Dark Matter Neutrino Mystery

Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos with our soothing Bedtime Astronomie podcast. Each episode offers a gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful slumber under the night sky.

I want you to start by visualizing a scene with me. We are on land. We aren't looking up at the sky from some mountaintop. We are deep, deep, underwater, really due We're at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. It is it's pitch black. Obviously the sunlight gave up trying to reach this depth a long, long time ago.

The pressure is immense, crushing.

It's silent and down there, anchored to the seabed. Is this well, this strange vertical forest.

That's a great way to put it.

It's a forest of cables, strings of sensors, just floating upright in the dark, stretching up from the mud, just watching the water.

This is the domain of the KM three net Neutrino telescope, and it's an incredibly eerie and frankly beautiful piece of engineering.

Right, and they're waiting for a flash, a tiny, faint blue flash of light that signals something is crashed into the water from space.

A cosmic ray, a neutrino, something from out there.

Now, usually this happens occasionally, you know, we catch a ghost particle here and there. It's part of the background noise.

Of the universe, exactly, just the normal hum of reality.

But I want you to take us back to twenty twenty three, because something happened in the data that well it really shouldn't have happened.

It was an anomaly that woke a lot of people up, a real wake up call in the data streams.

Bam, a single particle slams into the atmosphere, It interacts, and it sends a signal down to the depths. But this wasn't just a polite knock at the door, Oh no, this was a battering ram. The energy level of this single subatomic particle was.

Frankly, when I first read the briefing, I thought it was a typo. It just sounds made up.

It does sound like science fiction, or you know, an error in the spreadsheet. But it wasn't.

I looked at the numbers. This single particle carried in energy level roughly one hundred thousand times higher than the most powerful collision human beings have ever produced.

And just to put that into context for you, we're talking about the Large Hadron Collider, the LHC, The.

LHC, that twenty seven kilometer ring buried under the border of Friends in Switzerland.

The most expensive, most complex machine our species is ever built. We use the power gred of a small country just to turn it on. We accelerate protons to ninety nine point nine nine percent of the speed of light.

We smashed them together to try and recreate the conditions right after the Big.

Bang, and nature just casually threw a rock at us that was one hundred thousand times stronger than our absolute best effort.

That is the scale we're dealing with. Yeah, and the problem, the whole reason we're having this conversation today is that according to standard astrophysics, that particle shouldn't exist.

It shouldn't exist.

There is no gun in the known universe big enough to fire that bullet.

So we have a ballistics report with no gun exactly.

We have the bullet hole, but no.

Weapon, and that leads us to the source material. For today's analysis, we're looking at a fascinating new hypothesis from a team at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, your mass Amherst, and they're proposing that this wasn't a star, it wasn't a supernova, it wasn't a gamma ray burst. They think we witnessed a.

Death, a very specific and a very violent death.

I think we saw a black hole explode.

And not just any black hole, a quasi extremal, primordial black hole.

Okay, hold on exploding black holes. I thought the number one rule of black hole club was that you don't talk about things coming out of them. Right, They're the cosmic roach motel. You check in, you don't check out. Things go in, nothing comes out. How do we get an explosion?

That's the popular understanding, and you know, for big, stellar mass black holes it's mostly true. But when you get into the quantum physics of the very very small, the rules they flip.

They flip.

We're going to find out that black holes aren't really black, they're not perfectly stable, and they definitely don't stay quiet forever.

This is what I love about this topic. We're going to peel back the layers here. We have a mystery crash in twenty twenty three. We have a suspect, this exploding black hole. But the researchers we're talking Andrea tam Jaqui, Migua Juan, and Michael Baker, they aren't just trying to solve one crash, are they.

No. No, that's why this paper is making such ways. They're suggesting that this single impossible particle is a key, aike to what a key that could unlock three of the biggest locked doors in physics all at the same time.

A three for one deal.

If they're right, this explains the crash. It finally explains dark matter, the invisible glue holding the universe together, and maybe most excitingly, it gives us a way to find particles that we haven't even discovered yet, a complete catalog of reality.

That is a massive claim. So our mission today is to really get into that. We need to understand the crime scene, the weapon, and the motive. So it's good let's start with the crime scene, the twenty twenty three event. What exactly hit us? It was a neutrino, a newtrino, the ghost particle.

For good reason, newtritos are notoriously antisocial particles. They have almost no mass, no electric.

Charge, so they don't really interact with much.

They don't interact with the electromagnetic force, which means they're invisible to light, radio X rays. They only really talk to the universe via the weak nuclear force and gravity.

I've heard the stat that what trillions of them are passing through my hand right.

Now, trillions, mostly from the Sun. They're streaming through your body, through the chair you're sitting on, through the floor, through the entire crust of the Earth.

All the way through the core, all the way through.

The molten core, and out the other side, without bumping into a single atom to a newtrino. The Earth is basically just a thin fog. It's barely there.

So if they're so ghostly, so hard to catch, how did Cam three net that telescope in the Mediterranean, how did it actually catch one?

It's all about probability. It's a numbers game. If you have enough neutrinos passing through enough water, eventually, just by sheer luck, one of them will smack head on into the nucleus of a water molecule or an atom in the sea bed.

A direct hit.

A direct hit, And when that happens, the kinetic energy of that neutrino gets transferred to the wreckage. It creates a cascade of other charged particles, mostly things like muons or electrons, that then scream through the.

Water and they move incredibly fast.

They move faster than the speed of light in water.

Wait, faster than light? I thought Einstein put a start to that. That's the universal speed limit.

Right, ah, But that's the key qualifier. Faster than light in a vacuum is impossible. Nothing beats sea. But light slows down when it goes through a medium like water or glass, it drags a bit. These high energy particles they don't slow down as much, so they actually outrun the light they're creating. It's like a sonic boom for light.

And what does that look like?

It creates a cone of faint blue light called Chernkov radiation.

That's the blue flash.

That's the flash. The sensors in that underwater forest they see that blue cone of light, and based on the brightness and the angle of the cone, they can calculate exactly where the neutrino came from and crucially how much energy it had.

And this is where the twenty twenty three event just goes completely off the rails because the energy was well, it was off the chart completely.

We measure this energy in a unit called electron volts. A visible photon particle of light you see with your eyes is about two or three electron volts, Okay, very small. The lac smashes protons together at around thirteen terra electron volts. That's a TeV.

Trillions, thirteen trillion, Okay, that's a big number.

This neutrino was in the range of pav put electron bolt heta. What's that? That's quadrillions a thousand trillion, So it's orders of magnitude beyond what we can produce on Earth.

A thousand trillion electron vaults in one tiny particle. So why can't it be a star? We have big stars, We have supernovae, these massive explosions. Why can't a supernova spit out a peavy neutrino.

It comes down to something called the energy ceiling. This is a fascinating bit of cosmic.

Mechanically, the energy ceiling.

We know how magnetic fields and shock waves work in space and things like supernovae remnants. To get a particle up to that speed. You need to bounce it back and forth in a magnetic field like a pinball machine, gaining speed with airy bounce.

So it's like a natural particle accelerator in space. You spin it up.

Exactly, but there's a problem. Eventually the particle gets so fast and has so much momentum that the magnetic field can't hold onto it anymore. It escapes, it flies off the track.

Ah okay.

Standard astrophysical objects, supernova remnants, the jets from active galactic nuclei, they all have a limit on how tightly they can hold a particle while they're accelerating it. They leak, and the math says they generally leak before they can reach these peavy levels.

So you're saying the accelerator itself, it breaks before the particle gets fast enough.

Precisely, so when we see a particle this hot, this energetic, we know it didn't come from a pinball machine process where it was gradually sped up over time.

It had to be a single shot process.

A single shot something that released all that energy in one instantaneous event, like a bomb, like a decay or an explosion. And that leads us right back to the suspect the primordial black hole. Now I need you to deprogram me a little bit here, because when I think black hole, I have a very specific movie poster image in my head.

Interstellar Gargantua. Yeah, a giant, swirling disk of doom, a dead star that collapsed, spagheification, all that stuff.

And that's a perfect description of a stellar black hole. That's the standard model. You take a star, say, twenty times heavier than our sun, it burns through its fuel, gravity wins the final battle, and it crushes down to an infinitely dense point. Boom. You get a black.

Hole right the end of a star's life.

Primordial black holes or pdh are a completely different beast. They're not dead stars, they're fossils. They are relics from the very first moments of time, the Big Bang itself.

So these things are older than stars, older than galaxies.

Much older. Think about the universe. Just a fraction of a second after time zero, It wasn't empty space with stars sprinkled in it. It was a hot, dense, uniform soup of plasma. Everything was grammed.

Together, the cosmic soup.

Now, usually this soup is thought to expand smoothly, but Stephen Hawking and others back in the nineteen seventies proposed a fascinating idea. What if it wasn't perfectly smooth? What if there were lumps, lumps in the oatmeal exactly? What if there were tiny regions that were, just by random chance, slightly denser than the areas around them.

Lumps in the oatmeal of reality.

I like that if one of those lumps was dense enough, just purely by the weight of the matter packed into that small space, it would collapse under its own gravity. It wouldn't need to wait billions of years to become a star then die. It would just crunch, a direct collapse into a black hole.

So you get a black hole created in the first fraction of a second of the universe's existence.

Yes, and here is the absolutely crucial difference. A stellar black hole has to be heavy. It has to be heavier than the Sun because it came from a star that was heavier than the Sun.

Right, that's the entry requirement.

But a primordial black hole it forms from a random lump in the primordial soup. It could be any size.

How small are you talking?

It could be the mass of a mountain compressed into the size of a proton. It could be the mass of an asteroid compressed into the size of a single atom.

A black hole the size of an atom. That is a genuinely terrifying thought, just floating around out there in.

Space, potentially trillions and trillions of them.

Yes, Oh, wait a minute, if there's the size of an atom, wouldn't they just vanish? I mean, don't black holes need to eat stuff to grow and survive? If they're that tiny, can they even eat? Or do they starve?

That's the perfect question. They don't starve, they evaporate. And this brings us to probably the most famous equation Stephen Hawking ever wrote. It's called Hawking radiation.

I've definitely heard the term. It's the idea that black holes aren't truly black, right, they leak?

Correct. In classical physics, nothing escapes a black hole's event horizon. But quantum mechanics comes along and says, not so fast. At the very edge of the black hole, space is a weird, frothing foam. You have what are called virtual particles popping in and out of existence constantly.

Quantum phone.

Right, it's happening everywhere all the time. Usually a particle and its andy particle pop up, they find each other, they annihilate, and they vanish back into the vacuum. It's a zero sum game. But right at the edge of a black hole, at the event horizon, sometimes a pair pops into existence and one falls in and the other one escapes out into space.

So the black hole just it actually spits something out effectively.

Yes, from an outside observer's point of view, it looks like the black hole is blowing emitting particles. And because of the conservation of energy, the energy for that escaping particle has to come from somewhere. It comes from the mass of the black hole itself.

So the black hole loses a tiny, tiny gooit of mass. It's leaking.

It's leaking, it's evaporating. Now, for a big black hole like Sagittarius A, the one in the center of our galaxy, this leak is pathetic. It's colder than the background temperature of the universe. It would take a trillion times the current age of the universe for it to evaporate away. It's completely negligible.

But we aren't talking about big ones.

No, we are talking about the tiny primordial ones. And here is the completely counterintuitive rule of black hole thermodynamics, The smaller the black hole, the hotter it is.

Wait, run that by me again. Smaller is hotter, that feels backwards. Usually, you know, a big bonfire is hotter than the single.

Match the quantum world of black holes, it's an inverse relationship. A massive black hole is cosmically cold, and atam sized black hole is a ferocious furnace. It radiates energy furiation.

Okay, okay, I think I see it. So if it radiates energy furiously, it must be losing.

Mass faster correct, much faster.

And if it loses mass, it gets smaller. Correct, And if it gets smaller, it gets even hotter.

You see where this is going.

It's a death spiral. It's a runaway reaction.

It's a runaway feedback loop. A primordial black hole might spend billions of years slowly leaking, very quietly, not bothering anyone. But as it gets smaller and smaller, it hits a tipping point. The evaporation rates skyrockets. It starts screaming out particles.

So it shrinks faster, it gets hotter, screams louder.

The cycle accelerates until the last few seconds of its life or just a catastrophic release of energy.

And that final moment when it hits zero mass, that's the boom.

That is the explosion, a violent detonation that releases all of its remaining mass energy into a flash of fundamental particles. And according to the U mass researchers, that is what hit our atmosphere in twenty twenty three. We didn't see a star explode. We saw a microscopic, ancient black hole finally reach the end of its multi billion year fuze.

That is actually kind of poetic. This thing has been dying since the moment the universe began, and I finally went out with a bang, right on our cosmic doorstep.

And the energy profile fits a dying black hole of a certain mass, releases particles and exactly the kind of energies that heavy scale that cam three net detected. The shoe fits the crime scene perfectly.

But the UMAs team is saying it's not just about the energy, it's about what comes out of the explosion. They used a phrase in the paper that caught my eye, a democratic explosion.

Yes, this is a fascinating part of the theory.

I assume they don't mean the black hole is you know, holding elections before it blows up.

Hey. No. In particle physics, most interactions are biased, They play favorites. For example, the electromagnetic force only talks to particles that have an electric charge. It completely ignores neutrinos. Sure, the strong nuclear force only talks to quarks. It holds them together in protons and neutrons, but it doesn't care about electrons at all.

Right, it's a click different forces for different particles exactly.

But gravity, gravity is the ultimate democrat. Gravity doesn't care if you're a proton, a photon, a neutrino, or some weird hypothetical dark matter particle. If you have mass or energy, gravity treats you exactly the same, one particle, one vote, exactly. So when a black hole explodes, which is fundamentally a gravitational process, the unwinding of space time itself, it doesn't discriminate. It doesn't just spit out light, It doesn't just spit

That is just wild. So in that final burst, it's spitting out a shower of electrons, quarks, higgs, boson.

All the particles of the standard model. Yes, but it's also spitting out things we haven't discovered yet.

I love the analogy you could use here. It's like a pinata. You know, you hit a normal pinata star and you get I don't know, a stream of light beams a certain type of candy. But you crack open a primordial black hole pinata and you get the entire inventory of the candy factor. You get the standard lollipops and chocolates, but you also get the secret prototype candies that they haven't even released to the public yet.

That is a surprisingly accurate and useful analogy, and that's why this theory is being called a potential Rosetta stone for particle.

Physics, because it contains everything.

If we can analyze the debris from this explosion, like that single high energy in neutrino, we saw, we're not just seeing a crash, We're getting a data dump of the entire universe's fundamental particle catalog.

So we had a better look at that twenty twenty three event with more sensitive instruments we might have seen what Derek, dark matter, particles, particles predicted by string theory, supersymmetry, all.

Of it in theory, it's all in the debris cloud. It turns these explosions into the ultimate particle physics experiment. It's better than the LHC.

Better than the LHC.

The LHC can only smash together what we put into it, protons, lad ions. The black hole smashes spacetime itself and sees what falls out. It's nature doing the experiment for us. With energies, we could never dream of building on Earth.

Okay, I am completely sold on the concept. It's elegant, it explains the energy, it offers this incredible kresure trove of data. But here's the problem I'm seeing now. If these things are exploding, how often does it happen? Is this a once in a billion year's event.

You would think so, wouldn't you. But the UMass team ran the numbers based on the standard primordial black hole models. They calculated that these explosions should be happening within range of our detectors surprisingly often. How often is often? Maybe every decade or every decade?

Wait a minute, if a black hole blows up every ten years, and it releases this insane amount of energy. Why haven't we noticed this before? Why was twenty twenty three the first time we all said, whoa look at that?

And that question brings us to the plot twist. This is the detective story part of the paper because you are absolutely right. If they happen every decade, we should have seen them. And more importantly, we have another detector that should have seen them. Ice Cube. Ice cube the absolute heavyweight champion of neutrino detections.

This is the one in Antarctica right bird in the ice yes.

While CAM three net is in the Mediterranean Sea. Ice Cube is built into the solid, crystal clear ice of the South Pole. It's a full cubic kilometer of ice, instrumented with thousands of sensors. It has been running for years. It is incredibly sensitive.

So, okay, KM three neut saw the impossible particle. Did ice cube see it?

No?

It missed it. Bad luck, wrong part of the sky.

It didn't register the event at all. But the problem is much deeper than just missing one flash. Because you're right, the geometry of the Earth means sometimes one detector sees something the other can't. That's fine. The problem is the history, the history. If these explosions happen every decade, the sky should be lit up with them. From ice cubes perspective, ice Cube has been staring at the northern sky where this event came from, for a very long time. It

So we have a huge contradiction.

A massive one. On one hand, the standard PBH theory says, if primordial black holes explain the twenty twenty three CAM three net event, then there should be thousands of them exploding all the time, and we should be showered in these high energy neutrinos.

And on the other hand, the.

Observational data from ice Cube says it's quiet out there, eerially quiet.

So usually in science, when the prediction fails the observation test, you throw out the theory. You say, well, I guess it wasn't an exploding black hole after all, right.

You'd normally assume that CAM three net reading was a glitch, a censor error, a weird fluke. But the UMass team took a very different, very bold approach.

What did they do?

They said, Let's assume the data is correct. Let's assume Cam three Nette did see a black hole explosion. What would have to be true about black holes for that to happen? While also explaining why ice CUE hasn't seen hundreds of.

Them, They need a reason why the explosions are rare, rare.

Exactly, they need to turn the volume down on the explosions. Yeah, you need a new model where these primordial black holes exist in huge numbers, but they don't explode as easily or as often as the standard model predicts.

They have to thread the needle. They need to allow for one big boom in twenty twenty three, but prevent a constant storm of booms.

And this is where they introduce the new physics, the dark charge.

Okay, dark charge. That sounds like something straight out of a sci fi movie? What is it?

This is the core of their new paper in Physical Review Letters, the researchers, specifically Joachimiquis Juan and the team proposed that these primordial black holes aren't just simple balls of gravity. They possess a special property called quasi extremal status, and that status is driven by a dark charge.

Quasi extremal that's a mouthful. Let's break that down. What does extremal even mean in the context of a black hole.

An extremal black hole is a theoretical object where its electric charge is so strong that it perfectly balances out its gravity.

Arge balance is gravity. How does that work?

Think about it this way. Gravity is always attractive. It pulls everything in. But electric charge. If you have a lot of charges, say positive charges, packed together, it's repulsive. It pushes everything out.

Like trying to push two positive ends of magnets together.

Exactly. So, if you could cram enough electric charge into a black hole, the outward push from that charge would fight the inward crush of gravity. An extremal black hole is one where those two forces are perfectly balanced. It stops evaporating, it stops shrinking, It becomes a stable remnant. It gets cold and just sits there.

It hits the pause button on that death spiral we talked about exactly.

Now, in the real world, you can't do this with normal charge. Protons and electrons fly away too easily to create this perfect balance. But the UMass team is suggesting a new kind of charge, a dark charge.

What's the difference between that and regular charge?

Imagine our familiar force of electricity. You have positive and negative charge, right, and that force governs how electrons and protons interact. The dark charge is essentially a hypothetical copy of that electric force, but it exists in what physicists call the dark sector. The dark sector, the hidden part of physics. We know dark matter exists, but it doesn't interact with light or normal electricity. The theory suggests it might have its own set of forces, its own version

Okay, so walk me through the mechanics of this. We have these ancient tiny black holes. They're shrinking, they're getting hot, but they're also carrying the secret dark charge.

What happens as they shrink and get hotter. They spit out normal particles, photons, lutrinos, regular electrons pretty easily. But if this dark electron is really really heavy, the black hole can't spit it out yet. It doesn't have enough energy at that temperature to create one.

So it's stuck with the dark charge.

Right, the charge can't escape. It's like trying to pay one hundred dollar debt, but all you have in your pocket or pennies, You can't get rid of the debt. So the black hole holds onto the dark charge. As the black hole gets smaller, that charge gets more and more concentrated. The repulsive force builds up a Greakes kick in exactly, the dark charge pushes back against gravity's crush. It dramatically slows down the evaporation process. It prevents the

So instead of a universe filled with the constant pop pop pop of these black holes exploding every decade, the dark charge keeps most of them stable.

For a very very long time. It puts them into a state of suspended animation.

But wait, if it stabilizes them, why did we see an explosion in twenty twenty three? Why did that one go off?

Because it's quasi extremal, not perfectly stable, just barely stable on the edge. Eventually, after billions more years, the black hole gets just small enough and just hot enough that it can finally spit out those super heavy dark electrons.

Ah, so it can finally pay it's debt.

Once it starts shedding the charge, the brakes fail and then the gravity is unopposed again. The collapse resumes with a vengeance, the temperature spikes catastrophically, and boom, you get the explosion we saw.

So the dark charge acts as a safety valve or a regulator. It makes the explosions incredibly rare, but when they do happen, they are unbelievably potent.

Precisely, it perfectly explains the ice cube discrepancy. Cam three nets saw one of these rare catastrophic brake failures, but ice Cube isn't seeing a constant rain of them because the vast majority of these primordial black holes are sitting out there, stabilized by their dark charge, quietly and invisibly waiting.

That is incredibly elegant. It doesn't throw out the data, It saves the phenomenon. It allows the CAM three net observation to be real without breaking all of our other observations at the universe.

It does, and as Michael Baker, one of the co authors, points out, this added complexity is actually a good thing. Simpler models like the standard PBH model just don't fit the reality we see. Need to add this dark sector physics to make the math work out.

But the story doesn't end there, does it. Because once you introduce this dark charge and these dark electrons, and you theorize that there are trillions of these stable, tiny black holes floating around the cosmos, you suddenly realize you might have stumbled upon the solution to a much much bigger problem.

The biggest problem in cosmology.

We're talking about dark matter.

We're talking about dark matter.

We mentioned dark matter in almost every investigation we do on space. It's the ghost in the machine, it's the elephant in every room in physics. But give us the quick refresher. Why is it such a massive headache?

The headache is all about gravity. When we look at galaxies like our own Milky Way, we can measure how fast the stars on the outer edges are spinning around the galactic center. And based on all the stars and gas and dust that we can see, all the visible matter, they're spinning way too fast. There's nearly enough gravitational pull from the visible stuff to whole them in their orbits.

They should be flinging stars out into deep space.

Exactly like a carousel spinning too fast and the horse is flying off. But they don't the galaxies hold together. So there must be something else there, something invisible that has a lot of mass and is providing the extra gravity.

We call it dark matter.

We call it dark matter. It seems to make up about eighty five percent of all the matter in the universe, and we have absolutely zero clue what it is.

And we've been looking for decades. Right, We've been looking for these particles called WIMPs or axions.

We've built huge, incredibly sensitive detectors deep underground to shield them from cosmic rays. We've looked for decades. We haven't found a single wimp. The particle physics community is getting a little nervous that we've been looking in the wrong place.

So enter the u mass hypothesis.

Look at the object we just built with this theory. We have quasi extremal primordial black holes. They are heavy, they are ancient, formed in the Big Bang. They're spread all throughout the universe, and thanks to their dark shop charge, they are stable. They don't explode often, they just sit there.

They are heavy, invisible objects that don't emit light and only interact through gravity.

Which is the exact textbook definition of dark matter. Are you saying the researchers are explicitly saying that these charge primordial black holes are the dark matter.

So the dark matter holding our galaxy together. It isn't a cloud of exotic gas. It's not some weird undiscovered particle fluid. It's billions upon billions of tiny ancient ticking time bombs.

Potentially, yes, it can. It's all the dots in one go. The vast invisible halo of the Milky Way isn't a cloud of whimps. It's a swarm of these charge primordial black holes. They provide the extra gravity to keep our galaxy from flying apart, Nywady. Once in a great while, very rarely one of them finally loses its charge and debtonates, sending out a particle like the one we saw in twenty twenty three.

That is a staggering thought. The invisible glue of the universe is actually made of the most destructive objects in nature, held in check by a fundamental force we can't even see.

It unifies the micro and the macro in a beautiful way. You have this subatomic particle detection deep in the ocean, explaining the rotation of entire galaxies millions of light years across. It is a potential grand unified moment for this specific slice of physics.

It really makes you look at the empty space in the night sky differently, doesn't it. It's not empty. It's full of these dark charged seeds from the very beginning of time.

And that brings us to the future of this research because right now this is a hypothesis. It's a brilliant paper. It fits the math beautifully, it fits the observational data we have. But is it true?

How do we prove it? Do we just have to sit back and wait another ten or twenty years for another one of these things to explode?

That would certainly help. Another detection would be huge, but we might not have to wait that long. The UMAs team believes we are on the cusp of verifying hawking radiation experimentally for the first time.

Verifying Hawking radiation would be a Nobel prize on its own. That's a huge deal.

Sslutely, we have never actually seen a black hole evaporate. It's been pure theory for fifty years. If this twenty twenty three event is confirmed to be a PBH explosion. It's the first proof that Hawking was right. But it does more than that.

It proves the dark sector exists.

Yes, if we can get a better look at the next event, or even reanalyze the twenty twenty three data with more precision, we might be able to see the specific fingerprint in the energy spectrum that points to the decay of a dark electron.

Finding a brand new fundamental.

Particle, finding a particle that is not part of the standard model of particle physics, it would fundamentally break physics as we know it and open the door to a whole new reality. As Michael Baker said in his interview, it gave us a new window on the universe.

It's the joy of discovery, isn't it. I mean, think about the journey we've just outlined here. We started with a confusing blip on a sensor array at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. What could have been dismissed as a mistake in the data.

A simple outline, and by pulling on.

That single thread, these researchers have unraveled a theory that goes all the way back to the first second of the Big Bang, explains the glue holding galaxies together and essentially invents a new force of nature.

It is the ultimate cosmic detective story. And the best part is the evidence is literally raining down on us from space. We just need to keep our eyes and our dec sensors open.

So here is where we leave you today. We've talked about the dark charge, We've talked about the dark electron. It all sounds ominous, but it's really just hidden a shadow version of our own reality.

And it raised as a final provocative question. If there is a dark charge and a dark electron, what else is in the shadow?

Right? If there's a dark version of the electron, is their dark version of the proton? Is their dark hydrogen?

Are there dark atoms forming dark stars that burn with a light we can't see.

Are there dark planets orbiting those dark stars with dark life?

It is entirely possible that there is a complex mirrored structure to the universe that we we cannot interact with except through gravity and on the very rare occasion when one of their ancient black holes explodes.

That is a thought to chew on the idea that we are only seeing half the movie and the other half is playing out right next to us, all around us completely invisible, just waiting for a crash to reveal its existence.

The universe is far stranger than we can possibly imagine.

And on that note, keep looking up. You never know what might crash into the atmosphere next. Thanks for listening to this exploration, Stay curious.

Das sche