Smoldering Ember in a Star’s Heart: Two Apocalypse Scenarios ✦

Original: "The Life and Death of Stars That Capture Primordial Black Holes"

· Ore Gottlieb, Matteo Cantiello, Cameron Norton, Ken Van Tilburg, Matthew Kleban

arXiv:2606.02700v1 · 2026-06-01 · CC BY 4.0 · ⏱ 1 min · High Energy Cosmology Stellar General Relativity

Primordial black holes captured by stars can either quietly consume them over billions of years or set off a colossal explosion with powerful jets and gravitational waves.

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In the heart of many stars, an invisible spark may smolder—a primordial black hole ignited in the first moments after the Big Bang. Most often it parasitizes quietly, but sometimes it turns the star into a cosmic beacon, blasting jets brighter than a galaxy. We live in a moment when gravitational observatories can catch this death signal.

🎯 If a primordial black hole of 10¹⁶ g mass lurked in the Sun’s center, it would grow so slowly that the disk stage would only arrive after 10 billion years. We wouldn’t even notice—until the very finale.

🎬 The image of a star devoured from within echoes Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Rendezvous with Rama, where an alien ship uses a black hole as an engine. And in Star Trek (2009), red matter creates black holes inside planets, causing them to implode.

R_B = \frac{2GM_{BH}}{c_s^2}

The characteristic accretion radius, defining the region where the black hole’s gravity dominates over the gas's thermal motion.

P = \eta_a \eta_\phi \dot{M}_{BH} c^2

The energy output of a rotating, magnetized black hole, where efficiency depends on spin and magnetic parameters.

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Smoldering Ember in a Star’s Heart: Two Apocalypse Scenarios ✦