00:00 Black holes are one of the universe's greatest mysteries, and now a wild new theory could
00:07 make them even more curious.
00:10 Researchers at Yale and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics say tiny black holes that
00:14 formed shortly after the Big Bang might be hiding inside stars, literally eating them
00:18 from the inside out.
00:20 The study comes from a theory Stephen Hawking first devised in the 70s, outlining how mere
00:24 moments after the universe popped into existence, little black holes could have formed.
00:28 The only problem is we have no idea where these black holes could have gone, but they
00:31 would help physicists explain how the universe has so much extra gravity, something most
00:36 often attributed to dark matter.
00:38 That's where the new theory comes in, suggesting that somehow they got absorbed into neutron
00:42 stars, slowly sipping away at their stellar material for billions upon billions of years.
00:47 Most black holes range from 10 to 100 solar masses, all the way up to hundreds of thousands
00:52 of solar masses.
00:53 These tiny ones, however, might only have the mass of a planet or even smaller, like
00:57 that of a moon or an asteroid, meaning it could take one of them billions of years to
01:02 siphon all of a neutron star's stellar mass away from it.
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