Over time, Hawking radiation may cause them to completely evaporate the smaller they are, the quicker they disappear.

Stephen Hawking theorized that due to quantum effects, black holes emit particles and energy. Over time, the black holes would have attracted and gobbled up more and more mass, Riotto told Live Science.īut there may be another force at work, siphoning mass from these black holes: Hawking radiation. However, if these primordial black holes do exist, how would physicists find them? Would they look the same today as they did when they were born, almost 14 billion years ago? The new theory can also explain dark matter without requiring any new physics beyond the Standard Model, which describes the behavior of tiny subatomic particles. And primordial black holes, if they exist, could be physical evidence that the Higgs field is not at its lowest possible energy, and is instead in a quasi-stable state. The theory is appealing on many levels: Dark matter does not emit detectable light neither do black holes. These small mini black holes would have masses around 22 trillion pounds (10 trillion kilograms) - or about the mass of Mount Everest.

What's more, the Higgs' mass implied that during the inflation of the early universe, when matter raced outward immediately after the Big Bang, the unstable Higgs field experienced quantum fluctuations, where there were different densities of matter in different parts of the field.Īccording to the new study, these fluctuations made small pockets of space where the density of mass was so high it collapsed into a black hole.

After doing some calculations, physicists realized this mass implied the Higgs field might not be in its most stable state. When the Higgs boson was discovered, it was found to be about 126 times heavier than the proton, lighter than many physicists expected.

The Higgs boson arises as a ripple in the so-called Higgs field, which permeates the universe and gives particles their mass.

What is dark matter made of