14 DAY TRIAL // As they travel through space, black holes often bursts off radiation and cosmic flares, which, according to Virginia Tech Blacksburg researchers, could provide yet again with evidence that extra spatial dimensions exist. In the 1970s, British physicist Stephen Hawking revealed a solution to black holes, predicting that, given enough time, they would evaporate completely through a quantum process, called 'Hawking radiation'.
On the other hand, Hawking also showed that such processes are only available for black holes with masses comparable to that of a regular asteroid, as bigger black holes would not evaporate completely within the life of the universe. It is generally believed that the so-called mini black holes could have formed in the first seconds of the universe, as energetic elementary particles bonded together and collapsed into a singularity.
Michael Kavic of Vieginia Tech says that, if indeed extra spatial dimensions exist, black holes would be able to wrap around them to create a 'black string'. However, as black holes evaporate through Hawking radiation, they would eventually become too small to hide the presence of black strings. Kavic predicts that, when a black hole reaches this critical point in its life, the black strings would snap by determining the emission of a unique electromagnetic pulse, which would be evidence of the existence of extra spatial dimensions.
The characteristics of the radio signal would immediately provide with information regarding the size of the dimension, as the size of a black string is in direct relation to that of the extra spatial dimension revealed during the explosion of the black hole.
So far, such observations are limited by the fact that most of the current radio telescopes are only able to view limited areas of space at a time, thus the change of detecting a radio signature emitted during a black hole explosion are very low. Virginia Tech's Eight-meter-wavelength Transient Array radio telescope, on the other hand, can sweep the whole area of the sky in one go.
Telescopes however, are not a problem. The theory predicts that mini black holes should exist in the universe in relatively great numbers, billions or even trillions, but proving that at least one such object exists in the universe, is another thing. Finding the electromagnetic signature, would not only show that extra spatial dimensions exist, but also tiny black holes and Hawking radiation, not to mention the first evidence of a prediction made by string theory, which may one day unite gravity with the other three fundamental forces of the universe, to become the Theory of Everything.