Physicists are buzzing with an electrifying possibility: we might witness a black hole literally exploding in our lifetime—and it could upend everything we think we know about the cosmos. A team from the University of Massachusetts Amherst has crunched the numbers on primordial black holes (PBHs)—tiny, ancient relics theorized to have formed in the chaotic first fraction of a second after the Big Bang, some 13.8 billion years ago.Their fresh take? If these PBHs carry a minuscule "dark electric charge" (modeled in a clever "dark-QED toy model" featuring a dark photon and a heavy dark electron), they could become temporarily stabilized. This delays their evaporation long enough that many survive until today—only to meet a dramatic Stephen Hawking famously predicted, black holes aren't perfectly black: they slowly leak energy through Hawking radiation. Smaller ones heat up faster as they shrink, emitting more and more particles in a runaway chain reaction. The finale? A sudden, ultra-intense flash—brighter than a supernova in gamma rays—for a fleeting moment.Standard models suggested such explosions would be ridiculously rare (maybe once every 100,000 years in our observable patch). But this new scenario flips the script: explosions could happen roughly once every 10 years on average.The researchers calculate more than a 90% chance we'll catch one in the next decade with existing ground- and space-based telescopes tuned to gamma rays. No fancy new hardware needed—just sharp eyes on the sky.If we spot it:First-ever direct proof of primordial black holes. First direct confirmation of Hawking radiation in action. A one-shot "particle census": the blast would spew every kind of fundamental particle imaginable—known ones (quarks, electrons, Higgs) plus potential dark matter candidates and who-knows-what-else hiding in the shadows. It would be like the universe handing us a complete ingredients list for reality itself.The paper just dropped in Physical Review Letters (September 2025):Michael J. Baker et al., “Could We Observe an Exploding Black Hole in the Near Future?” Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 111002 (2025)Get ready—the cosmos might put on the ultimate fireworks show sooner than we think.