00:03Black holes are one of the universe's greatest mysteries, and now a wild new theory could make them even more
00:08curious.
00:09Researchers at Yale and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics say,
00:13tiny black holes that formed shortly after the Big Bang might be hiding inside stars, literally eating them from the
00:19inside out.
00:20The study comes from a theory Stephen Hawking first devised in the 70s,
00:23outlining how mere moments after the universe popped into existence, little black holes could have formed.
00:28The only problem is we have no idea where these black holes could have gone,
00:32but they would help physicists explain how the universe has so much extra gravity, something most often attributed to dark
00:37matter.
00:38That's where the new theory comes in, suggesting that somehow they got absorbed into neutron stars,
00:43slowly sipping away at their stellar material for billions upon billions of years.
00:47Most black holes range from 10 to 100 solar masses, all the way up to hundreds of thousands of solar
00:53masses.
00:53These tiny ones, however, might only have the mass of a planet or even smaller, like that of a moon
00:58or an asteroid,
00:59meaning it could take one of them billions of years to siphon all of a neutron star's stellar mass away
01:05from it.
01:06Oh, yeah.
01:09How about you?
01:11You're right.
01:12Yeah, the sittest.
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