![]() ![]() And new research suggests that we might one day be able to positively identify them, a breakthrough that would radically change our understanding of cosmology. It is a wild idea, but not inconceivable. DarkSapiens Origins of the Primordial Black Hole Stephen Hawking first mentioned primordial black holes (PBHs) in the 1970s as he developed his ideas for cosmology, findings that were a potential consequence of the radiation-dominated universe, a brief period in the early history of the universe. Recently, however, I have become interested in an even more exotic possibility: that some black holes could be older than the universe itself. Some of them could still be around today and, excitingly, they could be the answer to a whole range of cosmological conundrums. This workshop aims to discuss the phenomenological implications of Primordial Black Holes (PBH), such as their possible relationship with dark matter origin. We still don’t know if they formed, but there are good reasons to think they might have. Our work together set the trajectory of my career, much of which has been dedicated to studying what we now call primordial black holes. I was working on this idea under the supervision of Stephen Hawking, who had started to think about such a possibility just a few years earlier. pulsar timing array, which uses dead stars to hunt for gravitational waves, has scientists speculating about cosmic strings and primordial black holes. But in my article I also mentioned a more speculative possibility: that smaller black holes might have formed in the early universe, shortly after the big bang. We have even taken a picture of two of them. We know they form from collapsing stars and that supermassive ones sit at the centres of galaxies. Today, there is no longer any doubt about their existence. ALMOST exactly 50 years ago, when I was a PhD student, I wrote an article in this magazine about the mounting evidence for black holes, regions of space in which gravity is so strong that light can never escape.
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