Black Hole Supercolliders: Nature’s Most Powerful Particle Accelerators?

 

When you think of a particle accelerator, you might imagine a vast underground tunnel like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva—smashing protons together at incredible speeds to unlock the secrets of the universe. But what if the universe itself has already built far more powerful accelerators? That’s the bold idea behind a fascinating new study published in Physical Review Letters by astrophysicists Andrew Mummery and Joseph Silk.

Their paper, titled “Black Hole Supercolliders”, proposes that certain spinning black holes could act as natural particle accelerators—driving collisions at energies far beyond anything we can build on Earth.

The Power of Spin: Kerr Black Holes

The key to this cosmic phenomenon lies in the nature of Kerr black holes. These are black holes that rotate, dragging the very fabric of spacetime around with them. The faster they spin, the more extreme this effect becomes. In particular, when a black hole is spinning near its theoretical limit—what physicists call nearly extremal—its gravitational field becomes an incredibly powerful engine for accelerating matter.

Mummery and Silk explore what happens when particles fall into such a spinning black hole from two different directions. One comes from far away, pulled in by gravity. The other originates from a thin disk of matter spiraling inward—but moving in the opposite direction of the black hole's spin (a retrograde orbit (an orbit where an object moves in the opposite direction of the primary body it's orbiting, such as a satellite orbiting a planet in the opposite direction of the planet's rotation.)).

Natural Particle Collisions at 100 TeV

When these two particles—falling in opposite directions at extreme speeds—collide near the event horizon, they do so with astonishing energy. According to the researchers, the center-of-mass energy of such collisions can reach tens to hundreds of tera-electronvolts (TeV). That’s more than an order of magnitude greater than what the LHC can achieve (around 14 TeV).

In effect, this setup transforms a spinning black hole into a natural supercollider, running without any human intervention, powered purely by gravity and spacetime itself.

Could We Detect This?

So if the universe is smashing particles together at energies beyond our wildest dreams… can we actually see the results?

Possibly, yes. These high-energy collisions could produce detectable signals—particularly neutrinos, elusive particles that can travel vast distances without being absorbed. Detectors like IceCube in Antarctica and KM3NeT in the Mediterranean Sea are designed to capture such neutrinos. If we can trace some of them back to spinning black holes with the right conditions, we might be observing the afterglow of these extreme cosmic collisions.

A New Lab for Extreme Physics

This discovery opens up thrilling possibilities for science. Black holes could serve as natural laboratories for testing physics at energy scales unreachable by human technology. That includes probing the nature of dark matter, the behavior of gravity in extreme conditions, and perhaps even hints of quantum gravity—the elusive theory that unites Einstein’s relativity with quantum mechanics.

And unlike human-built accelerators, black holes don’t require funding proposals, construction crews, or years of upgrades. They’ve been at work for billions of years.

The idea of a black hole acting as a supercollider may sound like science fiction, but this study places it firmly in the realm of astrophysical reality. If such collisions are happening—and the byproducts are escaping into space—they could offer one of the most exciting new frontiers in modern astronomy and high-energy physics.

The universe might already be doing the experiments we dream of. Now, it’s up to us to watch closely—and try to understand the results.

Reference : Black Hole Supercolliders – Phys. Rev. Lett. 134, 221401 (2025)