Moments after the Big Bang, the newborn universe was a wild, hot place. In that cosmic soup, primordial black holes — the first black holes in the universe, formed from extremely dense pockets of matter — could quickly take shape.
For ages, our understanding of these objects, especially the smaller ones, was that they eventually just faded away through a quantum process called Hawking radiation. It seemed like a settled fate.
But a new investigation, published in January to the preprint database arXiv, has opened a different path. This research claims that these objects didn’t always shrink — sometimes, they could grow, becoming cosmic devourers that absorbed the radiation of the early universe.