High-Energy Particle Hit Earth: Black Hole Explosion Theory?

In February 2023, the sensors of the KM3NeT underwater detector in the Mediterranean Sea recorded a particle that defied all assumptions. This neutrino (event KM3-230213A) carried an energy of approximately 220 PeV, i.e. up to 30,000 times higher than we can develop in the most powerful accelerators. This immediately attracted the attention of scientists. However, even after many months of analysis, they did not discover any known astrophysical source (eg a blazar) capable of producing such a performance.

A bold hypothesis with a black hole

Neutrino are particles that fly through matter almost unnoticed and their detection is extremely difficult. The mystery was compounded by the fact that the rival IceCube observatory in Antarctica, which has been watching the sky for longer, was silent this time and did not record the event. This discrepancy indicated that it was not a normal cosmic background, but a brief and extraordinary event. Standard astrophysical models could not satisfactorily explain this discrepancy.

Now, experts from the University of Massachusetts come up with a bold hypothesis that revives Stephen Hawking’s ideas from the 1970s about the evaporation of black holes. According to them the signal is not a collapsed star, but a quasi-extreme explosion primordial black holesi.e. a miniature hypothetical object created a fraction of a second after the big bang.

According to Hawking’s theory, these light black holes should gradually emit energy. In their extinction, they then explode and release huge quanta of extremely energetic particles that our instruments can theoretically detect, the lighter they are, the hotter they are and the more turbulent their extinction.

Dark charge and “dark electrons”

However, in order for the numbers to correspond to reality, physicists had to extend the model to include hypothetical particles – so-called dark charge and exotic “dark electrons”. Due to their specific behavior, such black holes would only emit neutrinos in a narrow energy band, which explains precisely why only one of the two detectors picked up the signal. The final burst of energy, lasting mere seconds, could thus escape wider attention, even though it was unimaginably powerful.

Confirmation of this theory would mark a fundamental turn in the understanding of the universe, as these specific black holes could make up all the missing dark matter. Although it is only a mathematical model so far, it gives us hope for connecting particle physics with cosmology. Further measurements will provide a definitive answer, which will either confirm this hypothesis or definitively refute it.