DENVER, Colo. — Tiny, exploding black holes might solve a major mystery about how the universe as we know it came to be.
In the cosmos today, matter is much more common than antimatter. But scientists don’t know why. Matter makes up the stuff we can see, smell and touch. Yet antimatter — which is mostly identical to matter, just with flipped electric charges — is rarely observed. It can be released in radioactive decay or in particle collisions. But it doesn’t form solid objects.
Some physicists think that matter’s takeover of the universe may have involved tiny black holes. A black hole is a place where matter is packed so densely that nothing can escape it once it falls in, not even light.
The black holes at play here would have been born in the first instants after the Big Bang, when the universe began. If such black holes existed, they would have quickly...
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