Miniature and Stellar Black Holes

Such mini-black holes would have no obvious connection with star-sized, or stellar, black holes. So the formation of the smaller version likely has nothing to do with the life and death of stars. What force or process, then, could have created mini-black holes? In the early 1970s, noted British physicist Stephen Hawking offered a believable answer, namely that these tiny superdense objects came into being during the Big Bang-the enormous explosion in which, most scientists believe, the known universe was created. "With vast quantities of matter exploding all over the place," Isaac Asimov explains, some different sections of the expanding substance [i.e., matter] might collide. Part of this colliding matter might then be squeezed together under enormous pressure from all sides. The squeezed matter might shrink to a...