Imagine this: Large Hole Collider

A team including Joseph Silk of Oxford University's Department of Physics have dreamt up the biggest particle collider ever: a rotating black hole.

In an article to appear in Physical Review Letters, the team imagine how, once Earth-based machines such as the Large Hadron Collider can no longer provide enough energy to probe deeper into fundamental particle physics, certain sorts of black hole might do the job.

They have calculated that, in middle-weight black holes that are rotating fast enough, particles of dark matter entering at the right angle would be accelerated towards each other at extremely high energy - making for an explosive high-speed collision.

It may even be that enough energy could escape these natural collisions for us to be able to detect them on Earth right now, using the latest instruments such as the IceCube observatory.

Such observations could tell us much about dark matter, gravity, and the beginnings of the Universe - as well as revealing more about the structure of black holes themselves.

Read more about this story in New Scientist.