Paul H. Frampton

In the searing plasma of the newborn Universe, when space itself still rang with the echo of the Big Bang, objects may have emerged that challenge gravity itself. Not ordinary black holes — but electrically charged giants, astrons.

In the Standard Model, our most complete description of the subatomic world, electric charge is always a multiple of the electron's charge: nature works in whole units, like a builder using bricks of a strictly defined size. Yet the equations allow for particles with double charge — bileptons.

Just after the Big Bang, clumps weighing as much as a trillion Suns and with an electric charge of colossal strength, like trillions of electrified balloons, could have drifted through space.