Kinds of Black Holes
"Mini" Black Holes

In 1971 Stephen Hawking suggested that there might be "mini" black holes created by the Big Bang explosion (see picture on right), when our universe was created. The dense, incredibly violent turbulence that followed the explosion could have squeezed concentrations of matter to form black holes so small you can't see them in a normal microscope. These are often called "primordial" (meaning "first") black holes.

In Siberia, a region in northern Russia, on June 30, 1908 at 7:14 AM an amazing midair explosion occurred. The cause is still unknown. One of the causes suggested by scientists is an incredible impact of a very small black hole. The people who suggested it were A. A. Jackson and Michael P. Ryan, who were both at the Center for Relativity Theory of the University of Texas in Austin during that time. They suggested that the Earth had encountered a mini black hole with the mass of a large asteroid, but scrunched down to the size of a little smaller than a single atom.