Opening details

Our universe is believed to be full of black holes, but they are not always easy to detect. The ones we found range in weight from five solar masses to billions. But there is another important category of these objects, which so far has been provided only theoretically. IT primitive black holes that can be as small as subatomic sizes. If stellar-mass black holes form from the collapsing cores of large, dead stars, then primordial black holes are thought to form from the extreme density of primordial plasma that filled the universe after the Big Bang.

We don’t know for sure whether primordial black holes exist, but if they do, they open up many possibilities. For example, scientists say we could use these hypothetical “holes” in space-time. The battery converts non-electrical energy into electrical energy. A nuclear reactor uses the power of nuclear reactions to produce energy. And scientists claim that a small black hole could theoretically do both.

There’s a problem with very small black holes: Hawking radiation. This is the mass that the black hole loses due to the interaction between the black hole’s event horizon and the surrounding quantum fields. The smaller the black hole, the faster it loses mass through Hawking radiation. If the black hole is small enough, it will completely evaporate relatively quickly. A small black hole is also expected to absorb matter very quickly, making it difficult to extract anything from the space around it.

Zhang-Feng Mai and Rong-Qiu Yang of Tianjin University in China found that it is possible to regenerate and recharge a primitive black hole above a certain mass to produce electrical energy. An atomic-sized black hole with a mass between 1015 and 1018 kilograms would have to produce this energy while filled with charged particles.

The team also determined that a black hole could achieve the same efficiency as a nuclear reactor. Their equations showed that near a primordial black hole, 25 percent of the mass of the alpha particle produced by radioactive decay could be converted into kinetic energy.

Unfortunately this is not something we can confirm. Even if we were sure that such objects existed, we would be unlikely to capture, let alone contain, a primitive black hole.