Black holes are one of the universe’s greatest mysteries and now a wild new theory could make them even curious. Now experts say tiny black holes that formed shortly after the big bang might be hiding inside stars, literally eating them from the inside out.
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00:00 Black holes are one of the universe's greatest mysteries, and now a wild new theory could
00:07 make them even more curious.
00:10 Researchers at Yale and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics say tiny black holes that
00:14 formed shortly after the Big Bang might be hiding inside stars, literally eating them
00:18 from the inside out.
00:20 The study comes from a theory Stephen Hawking first devised in the 70s, outlining how mere
00:24 moments after the universe popped into existence, little black holes could have formed.
00:28 The only problem is we have no idea where these black holes could have gone, but they
00:31 would help physicists explain how the universe has so much extra gravity, something most
00:36 often attributed to dark matter.
00:38 That's where the new theory comes in, suggesting that somehow they got absorbed into neutron
00:42 stars, slowly sipping away at their stellar material for billions upon billions of years.
00:47 Most black holes range from 10 to 100 solar masses, all the way up to hundreds of thousands
00:52 of solar masses.
00:53 These tiny ones, however, might only have the mass of a planet or even smaller, like
00:57 that of a moon or an asteroid, meaning it could take one of them billions of years to
01:02 siphon all of a neutron star's stellar mass away from it.
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