Pedro Schwaller

In the first moments after the Big Bang, the universe was a boiling cauldron. But then, according to a new hypothesis, it suddenly cooled dramatically — far more than previously thought. In this icy world, dark matter particles, like tiny pendulums, froze and did not begin their oscillations.

In the early Universe, primordial black holes emerged — objects no larger than an atom but with the mass of a mountain. They gradually evaporate and, before disappearing, should produce gravitational waves — ripples in spacetime. If they were all identical, they would pop simultaneously, like popcorn kernels: the roar would be deafening.

A tiny black hole, no larger than an atomic nucleus, hovers in a cloud of hydrogen. It doesn't swallow everything around it; instead, it slowly radiates away, losing mass with every moment.

In an underground laboratory in South Dakota, the LUX-ZEPLIN detector, filled with liquid xenon, waits for rare collisions. Usually, dark matter particles pass through it without a trace, but one day a xenon nucleus was displaced with an energy of 248 keV.