{"id":237573,"date":"2026-05-22T03:19:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T08:19:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/crystals-of-space-and-time-a-structural-phenomenon-that-may-collapse-into-tiny-black-holes"},"modified":"2026-05-22T03:19:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T08:19:08","slug":"crystals-of-space-and-time-a-structural-phenomenon-that-may-collapse-into-tiny-black-holes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/05\/crystals-of-space-and-time-a-structural-phenomenon-that-may-collapse-into-tiny-black-holes","title":{"rendered":"Crystals of space and time: A structural phenomenon that may collapse into tiny black holes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/crystals-of-space-and-time-a-structural-phenomenon-that-may-collapse-into-tiny-black-holes2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A team from Vienna and Frankfurt has found a formula describing a strange phenomenon: Space and time can form a kind of \u201ccrystal\u201d that may turn into a black hole. The results are <a href=\"https:\/\/link.aps.org\/doi\/10.1103\/qgl5-5l3t\" target=\"_blank\">described<\/a> in Physical Review Letters.<\/p>\n<p>Alongside the famous gigantic black holes, physics also allows for microscopic versions. They emerge from so-called critical states, when spacetime organizes itself into a regular, crystal-like structure during a process known as critical collapse. A team from Goethe University Frankfurt and TU Wien has now succeeded, for the first time, in describing this phenomenon with an exact mathematical formula using an unusual mathematical trick.<\/p>\n<p>Black holes usually form in spectacular events, such as the death of a massive star. But in theory, arbitrarily small black holes are also possible: tiny microscopic objects that can emerge from special critical states after the slightest addition of energy. Such states may have existed shortly after the Big Bang, when the universe was still a chaotic mixture of particles, potentially giving rise to so-called <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2024-06-exotic-black-holes-byproduct-dark.html?utm_source=embeddings&utm_medium=related&utm_campaign=internal\" rel=\"related\">primordial black holes<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A team from Vienna and Frankfurt has found a formula describing a strange phenomenon: Space and time can form a kind of \u201ccrystal\u201d that may turn into a black hole. The results are described in Physical Review Letters. Alongside the famous gigantic black holes, physics also allows for microscopic versions. They emerge from so-called critical [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,2229,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-237573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-mathematics","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237573"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237573\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}