space Cosmic Scale

Tiny black holes left over from the Big Bang might be blowing up right now, briefly glitching the laws of physics.

arXiv · March 18, 2026 · 2603.15746

Miguel Vanvlasselaer, Sokratis Trifinopoulos, Alexandra P. Klipfel, David I. Kaiser

The Takeaway

If tiny black holes exist, their final 'death' is a runaway explosion that creates an expanding fireball in space. These bursts are so intense they could locally restore the high-energy symmetry of the universe that existed only a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

From the abstract

We investigate how Hawking radiation from low-mass primordial black holes deposits energy into the early-universe plasma and show that the resulting phenomena are hydrodynamic rather than purely diffusive. Combining analytic arguments with relativistic hydrodynamic simulations, we find that the plasma first develops a quasi-steady outflow during the slow evaporation stage, while the final runaway phase of evaporation produces an expanding fireball that launches a shock wave into the surrounding