TINY black holes could be eating stars alive and in the process causing gamma-ray bursts, the most violent explosions in the Universe.
Some physicists believe there may be hidden space dimensions that subtly affect gravity's behaviour. If those dimensions are big enough, it would allow mini black holes to be born when high-energy cosmic rays or neutrinos slam into matter. In theory this could happen in particle accelerators on Earth, such as CERN's Large Hadron Collider, due to start smashing particles in 2006. The black holes won't have time to swallow us up though, as they would "evaporate" almost as quickly as they formed, in a hail of energy called Hawking radiation.
However, if a microscopic black hole was formed in a "quark star", it would grow into a monster, says Peter Gorham of the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. A quark star forms if a star goes supernova and ...
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