A Chain Reaction of Black Holes Generates Gravitational Waves express

Original: "Hawking-radiation-ignited autocatalytic formation of primordial black holes"
· Alexander Yakimenko
arXiv:2511.18110 · 2025-11-22 · CC BY 4.0 · 1 min
Evaporating primordial black holes could trigger a chain reaction, birthing new holes and a distinctive gravitational wave background.

Right after the Big Bang, primordial black holes floated in the hot plasma — clumps of mass the size of a mountain squeezed into the volume of an atom. According to Hawking's prediction, they slowly evaporated, emitting radiation like tiny stoves. But this heat didn't dissipate without a trace: hitting dense plasma clumps, it nudged them toward collapse. Thus, a new hole was born in place of the evaporated one. The process repeated, and a front of black hole birth raced across the universe — exactly like a forest fire where each burning tree ignites its neighbors. The universe’s expansion acted like a downpour: as it cooled, the plasma became too rarefied, and the chain reaction fizzled out. As a memento, it left behind a characteristic low-frequency hum of spacetime — gravitational waves carrying a sharp cutoff signature. Detectors like LISA could pick up this signal: below a certain frequency, deafening silence, as if someone abruptly stopped the recording. Astonishingly, evaporation — usually the death of a black hole — became a mechanism of multiplication in the early universe.

The expansion of the universe acts like a downpour on a forest fire; once the plasma becomes too rarefied, the chain reaction cuts off, imprinting a sharp silence onto gravitational waves at low frequencies.

In sci-fi, self-replicating objects — from replicators to 'grey goo' — often lead to disasters. Here, black holes become cosmic replicators, but only at the dawn of time.

Scientists
Stephen HawkingJacob BekensteinHenri PoincaréFritz ZwickyJoseph WeberRainer Weiss
Concepts
hawking radiation mechanism Hawking radiation primordial black hole direct collapse black holes critical collapse quasi periodic eruptions radio loud quasar primordial gravitational waves cosmic particle acceleration remnant hills mechanism central engine bubble collision wave amplification particle creation quantum corrections nuclear reaction mass gap quasar feedback accretion disk wind information loss