Young Writers Society

Did Some Black Holes Survive the Big Bang?

Analysis by Ian O'Neill
Tue May 3, 2011 07:21 PM ET

Primordial-black-hole

Some black holes are a result of the violent supernovae of massive stars, others have persisted in the cores of the majority of galaxies for billions of years. Some theories suggest (harmless) microscopic black holes might even be spawned by particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider.

However, there is another subset of black holes that may have been produced during the initial energetic throes of violence immediately after the Big Bang.

The latter type of ancient black hole -- known as "primordial" black holes -- may be knocking around during modern times after surviving for over 13.7 billion years, slowly losing mass through the theorized mechanism of Hawking radiation -- the only form of radiation thought to escape from the gravitational ferocity of their event horizons.

So, there might be very old black holes, of an assortment of masses, drifting through the Universe, occasionally blipping out of existence, generating a short burst of gamma radiation.

Pre-Big Bang Black Holes?

Primordial black holes have yet to be detected, but in a new paper by Bernard Carr of Queen Mary University of London and Alan Coley from Dalhousie University in Canada, the theory of primordial black holes has been stretched even further. Could there be another type of black hole in our modern universe that was created before the Big Bang?

This new theory is born from the idea that we live in a post-Big Bang universe that was born from another universe that underwent a "Big Crunch." After collapsing through gravitational contraction, all matter in this "pre-Big Bang universe" contracted to a point, bouncing, thus spawning the Big Bang.

But here's the rub, if everything from the previous universe collapsed to a point and then exploded as the Big Bang, wouldn't all information be destroyed? Surely all matter would have been blended together as pure energy and spat back out, producing a universe that bears no resemblance to its progenitor?

Perhaps not, say Carr and Coley; perhaps black holes spawned by the impossibly compact conditions of that dying universe survived the Big Bang and are dispersed throughout the current universe. What's more, the pair of researchers have put size limits on the mass of black holes that might survive the Big Crunch/Big Bang party.