5 years earlier, well known astrophysicist Stephen Hawking thought that the Big Bang might have flooded deep space with small great voids. Now, scientists think they might have seen one take off.

In Feb. 2025, the European partnership KM3NeT– which includes undersea detectors off the coasts of France, Italy and Greece– revealed the discovery of a stupendously effective neutrinoThis ghostly particle had an energy of around 100 PeV– over 25 times more energetic than the particles sped up in the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most effective atom smasher.

Physicists have actually struggled to come up with a description for such an energetic neutrino. Now, a group of scientists who were not included in the initial detection have actually proposed an unexpected hypothesis: The neutrino is the signature of a vaporizing great voidThe group explained their proposition in a paper That was published to the arXiv database and has actually not been peer-reviewed.

Hawking’s elephant-size great voids

In the 1970s, Hawking understood that great voids aren’t totally black. Rather, through complex interactions in between the great void occasion horizon and the quantum fields of space-time, they can release a slow-but-steady stream of radiation, now referred to as Hawking radiation. This suggests great voids vaporize and ultimately vanish. As the black hole gets smaller sized, it discharges even more radiation, up until it basically takes off in a firestorm of high-energy particles and radiation– like the neutrino identified by the KM3Net partnership.

Related: Stephen Hawking’s great void radiation paradox might lastly be fixed– if great voids aren’t what they appear

All recognized black holes are extremely big– at least a couple of times the mass of the sun, and frequently considerably biggerIt will take well over 10 ^ 100 years for even the tiniest recognized great voids to pass away. If the KM3NeT neutrino is because of a taking off great void, it needs to be much smaller sized– someplace around 22,000 pounds (10,000 kgs). That’s about as heavy as 2 totally grown African elephants, compressed into a great void smaller sized than an atom.

The just recognized prospective method to produce such small great voids remains in the disorderly occasions of the early Big Bang, which might have flooded the universes with “primordial” great voidsThe tiniest prehistoric great voids produced in the Big Bang would have blown up long back, while bigger ones may continue to today day.

A 22,000-pound black hole needs to not make it through all the method from the Big Bang to the present day. The authors pointed out that there may be an extra quantum system — referred to as “memory burden” — that enables great voids to withstand decay. This would enable a 22,000-pound great void to endure for billions of years before it lastly took off, sending out a high-energy neutrino towards Earth at the same time.

Primitive great voids may be a description for dark matter — the unnoticeable compound that represents the majority of the matter in deep space– however up until now, look for them have actually shown up empty. This brand-new insight might offer an interesting idea. The scientists discovered that if prehistoric great voids of this mass variety are plentiful sufficient to represent all the dark matter, they ought to be taking off rather frequently. They approximated that if this hypothesis is proper, the KM3NeT partnership must see another showstopping neutrino in the next couple of years.

If that detection occurs, then we might simply need to significantly reassess the method we approach dark matter, high-energy neutrinos and even the physics of the early universe.

Paul M. Sutter is a research study teacher in astrophysics at SUNY Stony Brook University and the Flatiron Institute in New York City. He routinely appears on television and podcasts, consisting of”Ask a Spaceman.” He is the author of 2 books, “Your Place in the Universe” and “How to Die in Space,” and is a routine factor to Space.com, Live Science, and more. Paul got his PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011, and invested 3 years at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics, followed by a research study fellowship in Trieste, Italy.