Those weird signals from space might just be tiny black holes spontaneously flipping inside out into 'white holes' and blowing up.
March 25, 2026
Original Paper
Quantum Tunneling of Primordial Black Holes to White Holes: Rates, Constraints, and Implications for Fast Radio Bursts
arXiv · 2603.22516
The Takeaway
This study calculates how primordial black holes from the dawn of time could use quantum tunneling to transform into white holes—objects that violently eject matter instead of swallowing it. This 'flip' would release a massive burst of energy, potentially explaining the origin of the powerful Fast Radio Bursts detected by telescopes.
From the abstract
We calculate the present-day and cosmological volumetric rate of primordial black hole (PBH) quantum tunneling events to white holes, incorporating the competition between Hawking evaporation and tunneling, cosmological depletion, realistic mass-dependent abundance constraints, extended mass functions, and the alternative memory-burden scenario. The burst rate is maximized along a narrow ridge in the mass--tunneling-parameter plane where the effective PBH lifetime is comparable to the age of the