New research claims that miniature black holes could be in fact hollowing out planets and zipping through our bodies

Some physicists say the enduring questions about our cosmos could be solved by hypothetical objects termed primordial black holes. New study claims the evidence of their existence could be present right here on Earth.

Minuscule black holes capable of hollowing out entire planets could be tunneling through objects on Earth, according to a recent theoretical study. These hypothetical space-time missiles could be leaving microscopic traces of their passage in ordinary objects and even our own bodies, this research suggests. Formed in the sweltering afterglow of the Big Bang, primordial black holes (PBHs) are one of the candidates for dark matter — the enigmatic, invisible substance that makes up 85% of the cosmos’s matter. Yet the extreme minuteness of these hypothetical black holes means that, so far, no mark of them has been found. Now, a team of physicists, writing in the December issue of the hybrid journal Physics of the Dark Universe, has proposed a new place to look for signs — everywhere.

“The chances of finding these signatures are small, but searching for them would not require much resources and the potential payoff, the first evidence of a primordial black hole, would be immense,” co-author Dejan Stojkovic (a professor of physics at the University at Buffalo), said in a statement. “We have to think outside of the box because what has been done to find primordial black holes previously hasn’t worked.”

Black holes as we know them take birth from the gravitational collapse of dying stars or gas clouds. All through their lifespan, they can gorge on matter and merge with other black holes to grow to colossal, supermassive scales. But primordial black holes are different. Formed in the first few fractions of a second of the cosmos’s life from dense pockets of subatomic matter, the hypothetical entities are as weighty as mountains yet barely larger than a hydrogen atom. This makes proving (or disproving) their presence an extremely difficult task.

To aid in the hunt for these extreme entities, the physicists behind the new research caried out a number of calculations to constrain what astrophysicists should be looking for when they hunt for the objects. One idea they put forth is to look for asteroids and planets that captured the mini black holes and became hollowed-out by them. “If the object has a liquid central core, then a captured PBH can absorb the liquid core, whose density is higher than the density of the outer solid layer,” Dejan says. After sucking up the interiors of a planetoid, the tiny black holes could then escape from the planetary shell after an impact from another space rock sets it free.

Then, if the hollowed-out rock is fairly small — about one-tenth the size of Earth — it could survive as a shell for astrophysicists to spot. “If it is any bigger than that, it’s going to collapse,” Dejan said. But we may not even require to look into the skies to find evidence of the mini monsters. The experts also calculated what would happen if a primordial black hole travelling at high velocity were to zip through an object here on our planet. They found that a primordial black hole with a mass of 1.12 tons (1,019 kilograms) would bore a tunnel 700 times smaller compared to the width of a human hair if an unlucky object got in its way. Thankfully, that’s unlikely to cause any noticeable damage to human tissue, the scientists noted.