Speaker 1: Welcome to Bedtime Astronomy. Explore the wonders of the cosmos
Speaker 1: with our soothing Bedtime Astronomie podcast. Each episode offers a
Speaker 1: gentle journey through the stars, planets, and beyond, perfect for
Speaker 1: unwinding after a long day. Let's travel through the mysteries
Speaker 1: of the universe as you drift off into a peaceful
Speaker 1: slumber under the night sky.
Speaker 2: I want you to start by visualizing a scene with me.
Speaker 2: We are on land. We aren't looking up at the
Speaker 2: sky from some mountaintop. We are deep, deep, underwater, really
Speaker 2: due We're at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. It
Speaker 2: is it's pitch black. Obviously the sunlight gave up trying
Speaker 2: to reach this depth a long, long time ago.
Speaker 3: The pressure is immense, crushing.
Speaker 2: It's silent and down there, anchored to the seabed. Is
Speaker 2: this well, this strange vertical forest.
Speaker 3: That's a great way to put it.
Speaker 2: It's a forest of cables, strings of sensors, just floating
Speaker 2: upright in the dark, stretching up from the mud, just
Speaker 2: watching the water.
Speaker 3: This is the domain of the KM three net Neutrino telescope,
Speaker 3: and it's an incredibly eerie and frankly beautiful piece of engineering.
Speaker 2: Right, and they're waiting for a flash, a tiny, faint
Speaker 2: blue flash of light that signals something is crashed into
Speaker 2: the water from space.
Speaker 3: A cosmic ray, a neutrino, something from out there.
Speaker 2: Now, usually this happens occasionally, you know, we catch a
Speaker 2: ghost particle here and there. It's part of the background noise.
Speaker 3: Of the universe, exactly, just the normal hum of reality.
Speaker 2: But I want you to take us back to twenty
Speaker 2: twenty three, because something happened in the data that well
Speaker 2: it really shouldn't have happened.
Speaker 3: It was an anomaly that woke a lot of people up,
Speaker 3: a real wake up call in the data streams.
Speaker 2: Bam, a single particle slams into the atmosphere, It interacts,
Speaker 2: and it sends a signal down to the depths. But
Speaker 2: this wasn't just a polite knock at the door, Oh no,
Speaker 2: this was a battering ram. The energy level of this
Speaker 2: single subatomic particle was.
Speaker 3: Frankly, when I first read the briefing, I thought it
Speaker 3: was a typo. It just sounds made up.
Speaker 2: It does sound like science fiction, or you know, an
Speaker 2: error in the spreadsheet. But it wasn't.
Speaker 3: I looked at the numbers. This single particle carried in
Speaker 3: energy level roughly one hundred thousand times higher than the
Speaker 3: most powerful collision human beings have ever produced.
Speaker 2: And just to put that into context for you, we're
Speaker 2: talking about the Large Hadron Collider, the LHC, The.
Speaker 3: LHC, that twenty seven kilometer ring buried under the border
Speaker 3: of Friends in Switzerland.
Speaker 2: The most expensive, most complex machine our species is ever built.
Speaker 2: We use the power gred of a small country just
Speaker 2: to turn it on. We accelerate protons to ninety nine
Speaker 2: point nine nine percent of the speed of light.
Speaker 3: We smashed them together to try and recreate the conditions
Speaker 3: right after the Big.
Speaker 2: Bang, and nature just casually threw a rock at us
Speaker 2: that was one hundred thousand times stronger than our absolute
Speaker 2: best effort.
Speaker 3: That is the scale we're dealing with. Yeah, and the problem,
Speaker 3: the whole reason we're having this conversation today is that
Speaker 3: according to standard astrophysics, that particle shouldn't exist.
Speaker 2: It shouldn't exist.
Speaker 3: There is no gun in the known universe big enough
Speaker 3: to fire that bullet.
Speaker 2: So we have a ballistics report with no gun exactly.
Speaker 3: We have the bullet hole, but no.
Speaker 2: Weapon, and that leads us to the source material. For
Speaker 2: today's analysis, we're looking at a fascinating new hypothesis from
Speaker 2: a team at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, your mass Amherst,
Speaker 2: and they're proposing that this wasn't a star, it wasn't
Speaker 2: a supernova, it wasn't a gamma ray burst. They think
Speaker 2: we witnessed a.
Speaker 3: Death, a very specific and a very violent death.
Speaker 2: I think we saw a black hole explode.
Speaker 3: And not just any black hole, a quasi extremal, primordial
Speaker 3: black hole.
Speaker 2: Okay, hold on exploding black holes. I thought the number
Speaker 2: one rule of black hole club was that you don't
Speaker 2: talk about things coming out of them. Right, They're the
Speaker 2: cosmic roach motel. You check in, you don't check out.
Speaker 2: Things go in, nothing comes out. How do we get
Speaker 2: an explosion?
Speaker 3: That's the popular understanding, and you know, for big, stellar
Speaker 3: mass black holes it's mostly true. But when you get
Speaker 3: into the quantum physics of the very very small, the
Speaker 3: rules they flip.
Speaker 2: They flip.
Speaker 3: We're going to find out that black holes aren't really black,
Speaker 3: they're not perfectly stable, and they definitely don't stay quiet forever.
Speaker 2: This is what I love about this topic. We're going
Speaker 2: to peel back the layers here. We have a mystery
Speaker 2: crash in twenty twenty three. We have a suspect, this
Speaker 2: exploding black hole. But the researchers we're talking Andrea tam Jaqui,
Speaker 2: Migua Juan, and Michael Baker, they aren't just trying to
Speaker 2: solve one crash, are they.
Speaker 3: No. No, that's why this paper is making such ways.
Speaker 3: They're suggesting that this single impossible particle is a key,
Speaker 3: aike to what a key that could unlock three of
Speaker 3: the biggest locked doors in physics all at the same time.
Speaker 2: A three for one deal.
Speaker 3: If they're right, this explains the crash. It finally explains
Speaker 3: dark matter, the invisible glue holding the universe together, and
Speaker 3: maybe most excitingly, it gives us a way to find
Speaker 3: particles that we haven't even discovered yet, a complete catalog
Speaker 3: of reality.
Speaker 2: That is a massive claim. So our mission today is
Speaker 2: to really get into that. We need to understand the
Speaker 2: crime scene, the weapon, and the motive. So it's good
Speaker 2: let's start with the crime scene, the twenty twenty three event.
Speaker 2: What exactly hit us? It was a neutrino, a newtrino,
Speaker 2: the ghost particle.
Speaker 3: For good reason, newtritos are notoriously antisocial particles. They have
Speaker 3: almost no mass, no electric.
Speaker 2: Charge, so they don't really interact with much.
Speaker 3: They don't interact with the electromagnetic force, which means they're
Speaker 3: invisible to light, radio X rays. They only really talk
Speaker 3: to the universe via the weak nuclear force and gravity.
Speaker 2: I've heard the stat that what trillions of them are
Speaker 2: passing through my hand right.
Speaker 3: Now, trillions, mostly from the Sun. They're streaming through your body,
Speaker 3: through the chair you're sitting on, through the floor, through
Speaker 3: the entire crust of the Earth.
Speaker 2: All the way through the core, all the way through.
Speaker 3: The molten core, and out the other side, without bumping
Speaker 3: into a single atom to a newtrino. The Earth is
Speaker 3: basically just a thin fog. It's barely there.
Speaker 2: So if they're so ghostly, so hard to catch, how
Speaker 2: did Cam three net that telescope in the Mediterranean, how
Speaker 2: did it actually catch one?
Speaker 3: It's all about probability. It's a numbers game. If you
Speaker 3: have enough neutrinos passing through enough water, eventually, just by
Speaker 3: sheer luck, one of them will smack head on into
Speaker 3: the nucleus of a water molecule or an atom in
Speaker 3: the sea bed.
Speaker 2: A direct hit.
Speaker 3: A direct hit, And when that happens, the kinetic energy
Speaker 3: of that neutrino gets transferred to the wreckage. It creates
Speaker 3: a cascade of other charged particles, mostly things like muons
Speaker 3: or electrons, that then scream through the.
Speaker 2: Water and they move incredibly fast.
Speaker 3: They move faster than the speed of light in water.
Speaker 2: Wait, faster than light? I thought Einstein put a start
Speaker 2: to that. That's the universal speed limit.
Speaker 3: Right, ah, But that's the key qualifier. Faster than light
Speaker 3: in a vacuum is impossible. Nothing beats sea. But light
Speaker 3: slows down when it goes through a medium like water
Speaker 3: or glass, it drags a bit. These high energy particles
Speaker 3: they don't slow down as much, so they actually outrun
Speaker 3: the light they're creating. It's like a sonic boom for light.
Speaker 2: And what does that look like?
Speaker 3: It creates a cone of faint blue light called Chernkov radiation.
Speaker 2: That's the blue flash.
Speaker 3: That's the flash. The sensors in that underwater forest they
Speaker 3: see that blue cone of light, and based on the
Speaker 3: brightness and the angle of the cone, they can calculate
Speaker 3: exactly where the neutrino came from and crucially how much
Speaker 3: energy it had.
Speaker 2: And this is where the twenty twenty three event just
Speaker 2: goes completely off the rails because the energy was well,
Speaker 2: it was off the chart completely.
Speaker 3: We measure this energy in a unit called electron volts.
Speaker 3: A visible photon particle of light you see with your
Speaker 3: eyes is about two or three electron volts, Okay, very small.
Speaker 3: The lac smashes protons together at around thirteen terra electron volts.
Speaker 3: That's a TeV.
Speaker 2: Trillions, thirteen trillion, Okay, that's a big number.
Speaker 3: This neutrino was in the range of pav put electron
Speaker 3: bolt heta. What's that? That's quadrillions a thousand trillion, So
Speaker 3: it's orders of magnitude beyond what we can produce on Earth.
Speaker 2: A thousand trillion electron vaults in one tiny particle. So
Speaker 2: why can't it be a star? We have big stars,
Speaker 2: We have supernovae, these massive explosions. Why can't a supernova
Speaker 2: spit out a peavy neutrino.
Speaker 3: It comes down to something called the energy ceiling. This
Speaker 3: is a fascinating bit of cosmic.
Speaker 2: Mechanically, the energy ceiling.
Speaker 3: We know how magnetic fields and shock waves work in
Speaker 3: space and things like supernovae remnants. To get a particle
Speaker 3: up to that speed. You need to bounce it back
Speaker 3: and forth in a magnetic field like a pinball machine,
Speaker 3: gaining speed with airy bounce.
Speaker 2: So it's like a natural particle accelerator in space. You
Speaker 2: spin it up.
Speaker 3: Exactly, but there's a problem. Eventually the particle gets so
Speaker 3: fast and has so much momentum that the magnetic field
Speaker 3: can't hold onto it anymore. It escapes, it flies off
Speaker 3: the track.
Speaker 2: Ah okay.
Speaker 3: Standard astrophysical objects, supernova remnants, the jets from active galactic nuclei,
Speaker 3: they all have a limit on how tightly they can
Speaker 3: hold a particle while they're accelerating it. They leak, and
Speaker 3: the math says they generally leak before they can reach
Speaker 3: these peavy levels.
Speaker 2: So you're saying the accelerator itself, it breaks before the
Speaker 2: particle gets fast enough.
Speaker 3: Precisely, so when we see a particle this hot, this energetic,
Speaker 3: we know it didn't come from a pinball machine process
Speaker 3: where it was gradually sped up over time.
Speaker 2: It had to be a single shot process.
Speaker 3: A single shot something that released all that energy in
Speaker 3: one instantaneous event, like a bomb, like a decay or
Speaker 3: an explosion. And that leads us right back to the
Speaker 3: suspect the primordial black hole. Now I need you to
Speaker 3: deprogram me a little bit here, because when I think
Speaker 3: black hole, I have a very specific movie poster image
Speaker 3: in my head.
Speaker 2: Interstellar Gargantua. Yeah, a giant, swirling disk of doom, a
Speaker 2: dead star that collapsed, spagheification, all that stuff.
Speaker 3: And that's a perfect description of a stellar black hole.
Speaker 3: That's the standard model. You take a star, say, twenty
Speaker 3: times heavier than our sun, it burns through its fuel,
Speaker 3: gravity wins the final battle, and it crushes down to
Speaker 3: an infinitely dense point. Boom. You get a black.
Speaker 2: Hole right the end of a star's life.
Speaker 3: Primordial black holes or pdh are a completely different beast.
Speaker 3: They're not dead stars, they're fossils. They are relics from
Speaker 3: the very first moments of time, the Big Bang itself.
Speaker 2: So these things are older than stars, older than galaxies.
Speaker 3: Much older. Think about the universe. Just a fraction of
Speaker 3: a second after time zero, It wasn't empty space with
Speaker 3: stars sprinkled in it. It was a hot, dense, uniform
Speaker 3: soup of plasma. Everything was grammed.
Speaker 2: Together, the cosmic soup.
Speaker 3: Now, usually this soup is thought to expand smoothly, but
Speaker 3: Stephen Hawking and others back in the nineteen seventies proposed
Speaker 3: a fascinating idea. What if it wasn't perfectly smooth? What
Speaker 3: if there were lumps, lumps in the oatmeal exactly? What
Speaker 3: if there were tiny regions that were, just by random chance,
Speaker 3: slightly denser than the areas around them.
Speaker 2: Lumps in the oatmeal of reality.
Speaker 3: I like that if one of those lumps was dense enough,
Speaker 3: just purely by the weight of the matter packed into
Speaker 3: that small space, it would collapse under its own gravity.
Speaker 3: It wouldn't need to wait billions of years to become
Speaker 3: a star then die. It would just crunch, a direct
Speaker 3: collapse into a black hole.
Speaker 2: So you get a black hole created in the first
Speaker 2: fraction of a second of the universe's existence.
Speaker 3: Yes, and here is the absolutely crucial difference. A stellar
Speaker 3: black hole has to be heavy. It has to be
Speaker 3: heavier than the Sun because it came from a star
Speaker 3: that was heavier than the Sun.
Speaker 2: Right, that's the entry requirement.
Speaker 3: But a primordial black hole it forms from a random
Speaker 3: lump in the primordial soup. It could be any size.
Speaker 2: How small are you talking?
Speaker 3: It could be the mass of a mountain compressed into
Speaker 3: the size of a proton. It could be the mass
Speaker 3: of an asteroid compressed into the size of a single atom.
Speaker 2: A black hole the size of an atom. That is
Speaker 2: a genuinely terrifying thought, just floating around out there in.
Speaker 3: Space, potentially trillions and trillions of them.
Speaker 2: Yes, Oh, wait a minute, if there's the size of
Speaker 2: an atom, wouldn't they just vanish? I mean, don't black
Speaker 2: holes need to eat stuff to grow and survive? If
Speaker 2: they're that tiny, can they even eat? Or do they starve?
Speaker 3: That's the perfect question. They don't starve, they evaporate. And
Speaker 3: this brings us to probably the most famous equation Stephen
Speaker 3: Hawking ever wrote. It's called Hawking radiation.
Speaker 2: I've definitely heard the term. It's the idea that black
Speaker 2: holes aren't truly black, right, they leak?
Speaker 3: Correct. In classical physics, nothing escapes a black hole's event horizon.
Speaker 3: But quantum mechanics comes along and says, not so fast.
Speaker 3: At the very edge of the black hole, space is
Speaker 3: a weird, frothing foam. You have what are called virtual
Speaker 3: particles popping in and out of existence constantly.
Speaker 2: Quantum phone.
Speaker 3: Right, it's happening everywhere all the time. Usually a particle
Speaker 3: and its andy particle pop up, they find each other,
Speaker 3: they annihilate, and they vanish back into the vacuum. It's
Speaker 3: a zero sum game. But right at the edge of
Speaker 3: a black hole, at the event horizon, sometimes a pair
Speaker 3: pops into existence and one falls in and the other
Speaker 3: one escapes out into space.
Speaker 2: So the black hole just it actually spits something out effectively.
Speaker 3: Yes, from an outside observer's point of view, it looks
Speaker 3: like the black hole is blowing emitting particles. And because
Speaker 3: of the conservation of energy, the energy for that escaping
Speaker 3: particle has to come from somewhere. It comes from the
Speaker 3: mass of the black hole itself.
Speaker 2: So the black hole loses a tiny, tiny gooit of mass.
Speaker 2: It's leaking.
Speaker 3: It's leaking, it's evaporating. Now, for a big black hole
Speaker 3: like Sagittarius A, the one in the center of our galaxy,
Speaker 3: this leak is pathetic. It's colder than the background temperature
Speaker 3: of the universe. It would take a trillion times the
Speaker 3: current age of the universe for it to evaporate away.
Speaker 3: It's completely negligible.
Speaker 2: But we aren't talking about big ones.
Speaker 3: No, we are talking about the tiny primordial ones. And
Speaker 3: here is the completely counterintuitive rule of black hole thermodynamics,
Speaker 3: The smaller the black hole, the hotter it is.
Speaker 2: Wait, run that by me again. Smaller is hotter, that
Speaker 2: feels backwards. Usually, you know, a big bonfire is hotter
Speaker 2: than the single.
Speaker 3: Match the quantum world of black holes, it's an inverse relationship.
Speaker 3: A massive black hole is cosmically cold, and atam sized
Speaker 3: black hole is a ferocious furnace. It radiates energy furiation.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, I think I see it. So if it
Speaker 2: radiates energy furiously, it must be losing.
Speaker 3: Mass faster correct, much faster.
Speaker 2: And if it loses mass, it gets smaller. Correct, And
Speaker 2: if it gets smaller, it gets even hotter.
Speaker 3: You see where this is going.
Speaker 2: It's a death spiral. It's a runaway reaction.
Speaker 3: It's a runaway feedback loop. A primordial black hole might
Speaker 3: spend billions of years slowly leaking, very quietly, not bothering anyone.
Speaker 3: But as it gets smaller and smaller, it hits a
Speaker 3: tipping point. The evaporation rates skyrockets. It starts screaming out particles.
Speaker 2: So it shrinks faster, it gets hotter, screams louder.
Speaker 3: The cycle accelerates until the last few seconds of its
Speaker 3: life or just a catastrophic release of energy.
Speaker 2: And that final moment when it hits zero mass, that's
Speaker 2: the boom.
Speaker 3: That is the explosion, a violent detonation that releases all
Speaker 3: of its remaining mass energy into a flash of fundamental particles.
Speaker 3: And according to the U mass researchers, that is what
Speaker 3: hit our atmosphere in twenty twenty three. We didn't see
Speaker 3: a star explode. We saw a microscopic, ancient black hole
Speaker 3: finally reach the end of its multi billion year fuze.
Speaker 2: That is actually kind of poetic. This thing has been
Speaker 2: dying since the moment the universe began, and I finally
Speaker 2: went out with a bang, right on our cosmic doorstep.
Speaker 3: And the energy profile fits a dying black hole of
Speaker 3: a certain mass, releases particles and exactly the kind of
Speaker 3: energies that heavy scale that cam three net detected. The
Speaker 3: shoe fits the crime scene perfectly.
Speaker 2: But the UMAs team is saying it's not just about
Speaker 2: the energy, it's about what comes out of the explosion.
Speaker 2: They used a phrase in the paper that caught my eye,
Speaker 2: a democratic explosion.
Speaker 3: Yes, this is a fascinating part of the theory.
Speaker 2: I assume they don't mean the black hole is you know,
Speaker 2: holding elections before it blows up.
Speaker 3: Hey. No. In particle physics, most interactions are biased, They
Speaker 3: play favorites. For example, the electromagnetic force only talks to
Speaker 3: particles that have an electric charge. It completely ignores neutrinos. Sure,
Speaker 3: the strong nuclear force only talks to quarks. It holds
Speaker 3: them together in protons and neutrons, but it doesn't care
Speaker 3: about electrons at all.
Speaker 2: Right, it's a click different forces for different particles exactly.
Speaker 3: But gravity, gravity is the ultimate democrat. Gravity doesn't care
Speaker 3: if you're a proton, a photon, a neutrino, or some
Speaker 3: weird hypothetical dark matter particle. If you have mass or energy,
Speaker 3: gravity treats you exactly the same, one particle, one vote, exactly.
Speaker 3: So when a black hole explodes, which is fundamentally a
Speaker 3: gravitational process, the unwinding of space time itself, it doesn't discriminate.
Speaker 3: It doesn't just spit out light, It doesn't just spit
Speaker 3: out electrons. It spits out everything, everything, everything that can
Speaker 3: theoretically exist in nature. According to our laws of physics,
Speaker 3: if a particle is possible in our universe, the evaporating
Speaker 3: black hole will create it. It has no choice.
Speaker 2: That is just wild. So in that final burst, it's
Speaker 2: spitting out a shower of electrons, quarks, higgs, boson.
Speaker 3: All the particles of the standard model. Yes, but it's
Speaker 3: also spitting out things we haven't discovered yet.
Speaker 2: I love the analogy you could use here. It's like
Speaker 2: a pinata. You know, you hit a normal pinata star
Speaker 2: and you get I don't know, a stream of light
Speaker 2: beams a certain type of candy. But you crack open
Speaker 2: a primordial black hole pinata and you get the entire
Speaker 2: inventory of the candy factor. You get the standard lollipops
Speaker 2: and chocolates, but you also get the secret prototype candies
Speaker 2: that they haven't even released to the public yet.
Speaker 3: That is a surprisingly accurate and useful analogy, and that's
Speaker 3: why this theory is being called a potential Rosetta stone
Speaker 3: for particle.
Speaker 2: Physics, because it contains everything.
Speaker 3: If we can analyze the debris from this explosion, like
Speaker 3: that single high energy in neutrino, we saw, we're not
Speaker 3: just seeing a crash, We're getting a data dump of
Speaker 3: the entire universe's fundamental particle catalog.
Speaker 2: So we had a better look at that twenty twenty
Speaker 2: three event with more sensitive instruments we might have seen
Speaker 2: what Derek, dark matter, particles, particles predicted by string theory, supersymmetry, all.
Speaker 3: Of it in theory, it's all in the debris cloud.
Speaker 3: It turns these explosions into the ultimate particle physics experiment.
Speaker 3: It's better than the LHC.
Speaker 2: Better than the LHC.
Speaker 3: The LHC can only smash together what we put into it, protons,
Speaker 3: lad ions. The black hole smashes spacetime itself and sees
Speaker 3: what falls out. It's nature doing the experiment for us.
Speaker 3: With energies, we could never dream of building on Earth.
Speaker 2: Okay, I am completely sold on the concept. It's elegant,
Speaker 2: it explains the energy, it offers this incredible kresure trove
Speaker 2: of data. But here's the problem I'm seeing now. If
Speaker 2: these things are exploding, how often does it happen? Is
Speaker 2: this a once in a billion year's event.
Speaker 3: You would think so, wouldn't you. But the UMass team
Speaker 3: ran the numbers based on the standard primordial black hole models.
Speaker 3: They calculated that these explosions should be happening within range
Speaker 3: of our detectors surprisingly often. How often is often? Maybe
Speaker 3: every decade or every decade?
Speaker 2: Wait a minute, if a black hole blows up every
Speaker 2: ten years, and it releases this insane amount of energy.
Speaker 2: Why haven't we noticed this before? Why was twenty twenty
Speaker 2: three the first time we all said, whoa look at that?
Speaker 3: And that question brings us to the plot twist. This
Speaker 3: is the detective story part of the paper because you
Speaker 3: are absolutely right. If they happen every decade, we should
Speaker 3: have seen them. And more importantly, we have another detector
Speaker 3: that should have seen them. Ice Cube. Ice cube the
Speaker 3: absolute heavyweight champion of neutrino detections.
Speaker 2: This is the one in Antarctica right bird in the
Speaker 2: ice yes.
Speaker 3: While CAM three net is in the Mediterranean Sea. Ice
Speaker 3: Cube is built into the solid, crystal clear ice of
Speaker 3: the South Pole. It's a full cubic kilometer of ice,
Speaker 3: instrumented with thousands of sensors. It has been running for years.
Speaker 3: It is incredibly sensitive.
Speaker 2: So, okay, KM three neut saw the impossible particle. Did
Speaker 2: ice cube see it?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: It missed it. Bad luck, wrong part of the sky.
Speaker 3: It didn't register the event at all. But the problem
Speaker 3: is much deeper than just missing one flash. Because you're right,
Speaker 3: the geometry of the Earth means sometimes one detector sees
Speaker 3: something the other can't. That's fine. The problem is the history,
Speaker 3: the history. If these explosions happen every decade, the sky
Speaker 3: should be lit up with them. From ice cubes perspective,
Speaker 3: ice Cube has been staring at the northern sky where
Speaker 3: this event came from, for a very long time. It
Speaker 3: has never seen anything like this, not even once. It's
Speaker 3: never even seen an event one hundred as powerful.
Speaker 2: So we have a huge contradiction.
Speaker 3: A massive one. On one hand, the standard PBH theory says,
Speaker 3: if primordial black holes explain the twenty twenty three CAM
Speaker 3: three net event, then there should be thousands of them
Speaker 3: exploding all the time, and we should be showered in
Speaker 3: these high energy neutrinos.
Speaker 2: And on the other hand, the.
Speaker 3: Observational data from ice Cube says it's quiet out there,
Speaker 3: eerially quiet.
Speaker 2: So usually in science, when the prediction fails the observation test,
Speaker 2: you throw out the theory. You say, well, I guess
Speaker 2: it wasn't an exploding black hole after all, right.
Speaker 3: You'd normally assume that CAM three net reading was a glitch,
Speaker 3: a censor error, a weird fluke. But the UMass team
Speaker 3: took a very different, very bold approach.
Speaker 2: What did they do?
Speaker 3: They said, Let's assume the data is correct. Let's assume
Speaker 3: Cam three Nette did see a black hole explosion. What
Speaker 3: would have to be true about black holes for that
Speaker 3: to happen? While also explaining why ice CUE hasn't seen
Speaker 3: hundreds of.
Speaker 2: Them, They need a reason why the explosions are rare, rare.
Speaker 3: Exactly, they need to turn the volume down on the explosions. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you need a new model where these primordial black holes
Speaker 3: exist in huge numbers, but they don't explode as easily
Speaker 3: or as often as the standard model predicts.
Speaker 2: They have to thread the needle. They need to allow
Speaker 2: for one big boom in twenty twenty three, but prevent
Speaker 2: a constant storm of booms.
Speaker 3: And this is where they introduce the new physics, the
Speaker 3: dark charge.
Speaker 2: Okay, dark charge. That sounds like something straight out of
Speaker 2: a sci fi movie? What is it?
Speaker 3: This is the core of their new paper in Physical
Speaker 3: Review Letters, the researchers, specifically Joachimiquis Juan and the team
Speaker 3: proposed that these primordial black holes aren't just simple balls
Speaker 3: of gravity. They possess a special property called quasi extremal status,
Speaker 3: and that status is driven by a dark charge.
Speaker 2: Quasi extremal that's a mouthful. Let's break that down. What
Speaker 2: does extremal even mean in the context of a black hole.
Speaker 3: An extremal black hole is a theoretical object where its
Speaker 3: electric charge is so strong that it perfectly balances out
Speaker 3: its gravity.
Speaker 2: Arge balance is gravity. How does that work?
Speaker 3: Think about it this way. Gravity is always attractive. It
Speaker 3: pulls everything in. But electric charge. If you have a
Speaker 3: lot of charges, say positive charges, packed together, it's repulsive.
Speaker 3: It pushes everything out.
Speaker 2: Like trying to push two positive ends of magnets together.
Speaker 3: Exactly. So, if you could cram enough electric charge into
Speaker 3: a black hole, the outward push from that charge would
Speaker 3: fight the inward crush of gravity. An extremal black hole
Speaker 3: is one where those two forces are perfectly balanced. It
Speaker 3: stops evaporating, it stops shrinking, It becomes a stable remnant.
Speaker 3: It gets cold and just sits there.
Speaker 2: It hits the pause button on that death spiral we
Speaker 2: talked about exactly.
Speaker 3: Now, in the real world, you can't do this with
Speaker 3: normal charge. Protons and electrons fly away too easily to
Speaker 3: create this perfect balance. But the UMass team is suggesting
Speaker 3: a new kind of charge, a dark charge.
Speaker 2: What's the difference between that and regular charge?
Speaker 3: Imagine our familiar force of electricity. You have positive and
Speaker 3: negative charge, right, and that force governs how electrons and
Speaker 3: protons interact. The dark charge is essentially a hypothetical copy
Speaker 3: of that electric force, but it exists in what physicists
Speaker 3: call the dark sector. The dark sector, the hidden part
Speaker 3: of physics. We know dark matter exists, but it doesn't
Speaker 3: interact with light or normal electricity. The theory suggests it
Speaker 3: might have its own set of forces, its own version
Speaker 3: of electromagnetism. And just like we have electrons that carry
Speaker 3: our charge, this dark charge would be carried by a
Speaker 3: dark electron, a dark electron, a hypothesized, very heavy and
Speaker 3: completely invisible version of the electron.
Speaker 2: Okay, so walk me through the mechanics of this. We
Speaker 2: have these ancient tiny black holes. They're shrinking, they're getting hot,
Speaker 2: but they're also carrying the secret dark charge.
Speaker 3: What happens as they shrink and get hotter. They spit
Speaker 3: out normal particles, photons, lutrinos, regular electrons pretty easily. But
Speaker 3: if this dark electron is really really heavy, the black
Speaker 3: hole can't spit it out yet. It doesn't have enough
Speaker 3: energy at that temperature to create one.
Speaker 2: So it's stuck with the dark charge.
Speaker 3: Right, the charge can't escape. It's like trying to pay
Speaker 3: one hundred dollar debt, but all you have in your
Speaker 3: pocket or pennies, You can't get rid of the debt.
Speaker 3: So the black hole holds onto the dark charge. As
Speaker 3: the black hole gets smaller, that charge gets more and
Speaker 3: more concentrated. The repulsive force builds up a Greakes kick
Speaker 3: in exactly, the dark charge pushes back against gravity's crush.
Speaker 3: It dramatically slows down the evaporation process. It prevents the
Speaker 3: black hole from racing toward that final violent explosion. It
Speaker 3: stabilizes it.
Speaker 2: So instead of a universe filled with the constant pop
Speaker 2: pop pop of these black holes exploding every decade, the
Speaker 2: dark charge keeps most of them stable.
Speaker 3: For a very very long time. It puts them into
Speaker 3: a state of suspended animation.
Speaker 2: But wait, if it stabilizes them, why did we see
Speaker 2: an explosion in twenty twenty three? Why did that one
Speaker 2: go off?
Speaker 3: Because it's quasi extremal, not perfectly stable, just barely stable
Speaker 3: on the edge. Eventually, after billions more years, the black
Speaker 3: hole gets just small enough and just hot enough that
Speaker 3: it can finally spit out those super heavy dark electrons.
Speaker 2: Ah, so it can finally pay it's debt.
Speaker 3: Once it starts shedding the charge, the brakes fail and
Speaker 3: then the gravity is unopposed again. The collapse resumes with
Speaker 3: a vengeance, the temperature spikes catastrophically, and boom, you get
Speaker 3: the explosion we saw.
Speaker 2: So the dark charge acts as a safety valve or
Speaker 2: a regulator. It makes the explosions incredibly rare, but when
Speaker 2: they do happen, they are unbelievably potent.
Speaker 3: Precisely, it perfectly explains the ice cube discrepancy. Cam three
Speaker 3: nets saw one of these rare catastrophic brake failures, but
Speaker 3: ice Cube isn't seeing a constant rain of them because
Speaker 3: the vast majority of these primordial black holes are sitting
Speaker 3: out there, stabilized by their dark charge, quietly and invisibly waiting.
Speaker 2: That is incredibly elegant. It doesn't throw out the data,
Speaker 2: It saves the phenomenon. It allows the CAM three net
Speaker 2: observation to be real without breaking all of our other
Speaker 2: observations at the universe.
Speaker 3: It does, and as Michael Baker, one of the co authors,
Speaker 3: points out, this added complexity is actually a good thing.
Speaker 3: Simpler models like the standard PBH model just don't fit
Speaker 3: the reality we see. Need to add this dark sector
Speaker 3: physics to make the math work out.
Speaker 2: But the story doesn't end there, does it. Because once
Speaker 2: you introduce this dark charge and these dark electrons, and
Speaker 2: you theorize that there are trillions of these stable, tiny
Speaker 2: black holes floating around the cosmos, you suddenly realize you
Speaker 2: might have stumbled upon the solution to a much much
Speaker 2: bigger problem.
Speaker 3: The biggest problem in cosmology.
Speaker 2: We're talking about dark matter.
Speaker 3: We're talking about dark matter.
Speaker 2: We mentioned dark matter in almost every investigation we do
Speaker 2: on space. It's the ghost in the machine, it's the
Speaker 2: elephant in every room in physics. But give us the
Speaker 2: quick refresher. Why is it such a massive headache?
Speaker 3: The headache is all about gravity. When we look at
Speaker 3: galaxies like our own Milky Way, we can measure how
Speaker 3: fast the stars on the outer edges are spinning around
Speaker 3: the galactic center. And based on all the stars and
Speaker 3: gas and dust that we can see, all the visible matter,
Speaker 3: they're spinning way too fast. There's nearly enough gravitational pull
Speaker 3: from the visible stuff to whole them in their orbits.
Speaker 2: They should be flinging stars out into deep space.
Speaker 3: Exactly like a carousel spinning too fast and the horse
Speaker 3: is flying off. But they don't the galaxies hold together.
Speaker 3: So there must be something else there, something invisible that
Speaker 3: has a lot of mass and is providing the extra gravity.
Speaker 2: We call it dark matter.
Speaker 3: We call it dark matter. It seems to make up
Speaker 3: about eighty five percent of all the matter in the universe,
Speaker 3: and we have absolutely zero clue what it is.
Speaker 2: And we've been looking for decades. Right, We've been looking
Speaker 2: for these particles called WIMPs or axions.
Speaker 3: We've built huge, incredibly sensitive detectors deep underground to shield
Speaker 3: them from cosmic rays. We've looked for decades. We haven't
Speaker 3: found a single wimp. The particle physics community is getting
Speaker 3: a little nervous that we've been looking in the wrong place.
Speaker 2: So enter the u mass hypothesis.
Speaker 3: Look at the object we just built with this theory.
Speaker 3: We have quasi extremal primordial black holes. They are heavy,
Speaker 3: they are ancient, formed in the Big Bang. They're spread
Speaker 3: all throughout the universe, and thanks to their dark shop charge,
Speaker 3: they are stable. They don't explode often, they just sit there.
Speaker 2: They are heavy, invisible objects that don't emit light and
Speaker 2: only interact through gravity.
Speaker 3: Which is the exact textbook definition of dark matter. Are
Speaker 3: you saying the researchers are explicitly saying that these charge
Speaker 3: primordial black holes are the dark matter.
Speaker 2: So the dark matter holding our galaxy together. It isn't
Speaker 2: a cloud of exotic gas. It's not some weird undiscovered
Speaker 2: particle fluid. It's billions upon billions of tiny ancient ticking
Speaker 2: time bombs.
Speaker 3: Potentially, yes, it can. It's all the dots in one go.
Speaker 3: The vast invisible halo of the Milky Way isn't a
Speaker 3: cloud of whimps. It's a swarm of these charge primordial
Speaker 3: black holes. They provide the extra gravity to keep our
Speaker 3: galaxy from flying apart, Nywady. Once in a great while,
Speaker 3: very rarely one of them finally loses its charge and debtonates,
Speaker 3: sending out a particle like the one we saw in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty three.
Speaker 2: That is a staggering thought. The invisible glue of the
Speaker 2: universe is actually made of the most destructive objects in nature,
Speaker 2: held in check by a fundamental force we can't even see.
Speaker 3: It unifies the micro and the macro in a beautiful way.
Speaker 3: You have this subatomic particle detection deep in the ocean,
Speaker 3: explaining the rotation of entire galaxies millions of light years across.
Speaker 3: It is a potential grand unified moment for this specific
Speaker 3: slice of physics.
Speaker 2: It really makes you look at the empty space in
Speaker 2: the night sky differently, doesn't it. It's not empty. It's
Speaker 2: full of these dark charged seeds from the very beginning
Speaker 2: of time.
Speaker 3: And that brings us to the future of this research
Speaker 3: because right now this is a hypothesis. It's a brilliant paper.
Speaker 3: It fits the math beautifully, it fits the observational data
Speaker 3: we have. But is it true?
Speaker 2: How do we prove it? Do we just have to
Speaker 2: sit back and wait another ten or twenty years for
Speaker 2: another one of these things to explode?
Speaker 3: That would certainly help. Another detection would be huge, but
Speaker 3: we might not have to wait that long. The UMAs
Speaker 3: team believes we are on the cusp of verifying hawking
Speaker 3: radiation experimentally for the first time.
Speaker 2: Verifying Hawking radiation would be a Nobel prize on its own.
Speaker 2: That's a huge deal.
Speaker 3: Sslutely, we have never actually seen a black hole evaporate.
Speaker 3: It's been pure theory for fifty years. If this twenty
Speaker 3: twenty three event is confirmed to be a PBH explosion.
Speaker 3: It's the first proof that Hawking was right. But it
Speaker 3: does more than that.
Speaker 2: It proves the dark sector exists.
Speaker 3: Yes, if we can get a better look at the
Speaker 3: next event, or even reanalyze the twenty twenty three data
Speaker 3: with more precision, we might be able to see the
Speaker 3: specific fingerprint in the energy spectrum that points to the
Speaker 3: decay of a dark electron.
Speaker 2: Finding a brand new fundamental.
Speaker 3: Particle, finding a particle that is not part of the
Speaker 3: standard model of particle physics, it would fundamentally break physics
Speaker 3: as we know it and open the door to a
Speaker 3: whole new reality. As Michael Baker said in his interview,
Speaker 3: it gave us a new window on the universe.
Speaker 2: It's the joy of discovery, isn't it. I mean, think
Speaker 2: about the journey we've just outlined here. We started with
Speaker 2: a confusing blip on a sensor array at the bottom
Speaker 2: of the Mediterranean Sea. What could have been dismissed as
Speaker 2: a mistake in the data.
Speaker 3: A simple outline, and by pulling on.
Speaker 2: That single thread, these researchers have unraveled a theory that
Speaker 2: goes all the way back to the first second of
Speaker 2: the Big Bang, explains the glue holding galaxies together and
Speaker 2: essentially invents a new force of nature.
Speaker 3: It is the ultimate cosmic detective story. And the best
Speaker 3: part is the evidence is literally raining down on us
Speaker 3: from space. We just need to keep our eyes and
Speaker 3: our dec sensors open.
Speaker 2: So here is where we leave you today. We've talked
Speaker 2: about the dark charge, We've talked about the dark electron.
Speaker 2: It all sounds ominous, but it's really just hidden a
Speaker 2: shadow version of our own reality.
Speaker 3: And it raised as a final provocative question. If there
Speaker 3: is a dark charge and a dark electron, what else
Speaker 3: is in the shadow?
Speaker 2: Right? If there's a dark version of the electron, is
Speaker 2: their dark version of the proton? Is their dark hydrogen?
Speaker 3: Are there dark atoms forming dark stars that burn with
Speaker 3: a light we can't see.
Speaker 2: Are there dark planets orbiting those dark stars with dark life?
Speaker 3: It is entirely possible that there is a complex mirrored
Speaker 3: structure to the universe that we we cannot interact with
Speaker 3: except through gravity and on the very rare occasion when
Speaker 3: one of their ancient black holes explodes.
Speaker 2: That is a thought to chew on the idea that
Speaker 2: we are only seeing half the movie and the other
Speaker 2: half is playing out right next to us, all around
Speaker 2: us completely invisible, just waiting for a crash to reveal
Speaker 2: its existence.
Speaker 3: The universe is far stranger than we can possibly imagine.
Speaker 2: And on that note, keep looking up. You never know
Speaker 2: what might crash into the atmosphere next. Thanks for listening
Speaker 2: to this exploration, Stay curious.
Speaker 1: Das sche