HERAKLION, Greece, Dec. 3 (UPI) -- High energy cosmic rays crashing into Earth's atmosphere may be forming mini black holes, according to Greek and Russian scientists.
Ordinary black holes form when stars explode at the end of their lives, New Scientist reported Wednesday.
The heavy stellar core can collapse into a superdense "singularity" whose gravity is so strong that nothing -- not even light -- can escape.
Theodore Tomaras, a physicist at the University of Crete in Heraklion, Greece, and his Russian colleagues, Andrei Mironov and Alexei Morozov, theorize that high-energy cosmic-ray particles from space create black holes when they collide with molecules in the Earth's atmosphere.
These black holes would be invisibly small, with a mass of only 10 micrograms or so, Tomaras said.
And these black holes would be so unstable that they would explode in a burst of particles within around a billion-billion-billionth of a second.
Tomaras suggested that such mini black holes might explain some strange observations made by cosmic-ray detectors in the Bolivian Andes and on a mountain in Tajikistan, central Asia.
The detectors record showers of particles that cascade through the atmosphere when a high-energy cosmic-ray particle smashes into molecules there.
