BGR By Elias Nash April 5, 2026
The nature of black holes has long been shrouded in mystery, but some astronomers believe the answers are a lot closer to home than expected. A fringe astronomical theory known as "black hole cosmology" proposes that all of us are actually living inside of a black hole. That black hole could even exist within another universe, itself inside of a black hole, with the model having no clear end. The idea has been around for half a century now, but it wasn't taken very seriously at first. However, a series of recent studies has brought newfound attention to this mind-bending model of the cosmos.
Black hole cosmology was introduced by theoretical physicist Raj Kumar Pathria in a 1972 study published in the journal Nature. He was inspired by Einstein's theory of relativity (now supported by a new map of dark matter) and the work of Karl Schwarzschild, the astronomer who first solved Einstein's general relativity equations. Schwarzschild's work showed that there is a limit to how much mass can occupy a given space, and that every physical object, if compressed into that space, will collapse into a black hole. This limit is known as the Schwarzschild radius. For example, the Schwarzschild radius of the sun is about two miles. If you compressed the sun into a sphere with just a two-mile radius, it would become a black hole.
What Pathria realized is that the radius of the observable universe is the same as the Schwarzschild radius of the universe's mass. That's something you'd typically only expect from a black hole.
When Raj Kumar Pathria first proposed black hole cosmology, also known as Schwarzschild cosmology, the theory failed to gain mainstream traction. However, two studies from 2025 could change that. The first was a paper published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, which looked at images of more than 250 distant galaxies captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, which is now being improved with AI. It showed that roughly two-thirds of the galaxies rotate in a clockwise direction, while the rest rotate counterclockwise. On a scale as large as the universe, the split should theoretically be even. The fact that a majority of galaxies rotate in a specific direction could imply that the universe itself is rotating. There's no clear explanation for this, but it would fit with the behavior of a black hole.
More:
https://www.bgr.com/2135539/universe-inside-black-hole-scientists-opinions/
