The Science Quiz: Entities that lie at the edge of physics

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Name the man in the picture. The mass of a subatomic particle named for him is very close to a figure that, if that had been the actual mass, could have destroyed the universe as we know it. Credit: Bengt Nyman

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The _____________ ___________ is the name for the condition in which spacetime suffers a catastrophic breakdown. Scientists have said they can be understood only by a theory of quantum gravity, but no such complete theory currently exists. Fill in the blanks.

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The first observational evidence that _______ _____ exist in nature was provided by a monumental discovery in 1967. A matchbox-sized piece of this object is expected to weigh around three billion tonnes. The Milky Way alone is expected to have a billion of them. Fill in the blanks.

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The QGP is a state of matter that cosmologists expect filled our universe in the first hundred microseconds of its life at a temperature of around 1 trillion K. In these conditions, the subatomic particles that make up matter are forced to break up into their smallest constituents. What does QGP stand for?

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A ______ ___________ is the result of a short-lived and random change in the energy of a point in empty space. They cause pairs of subatomic particles to be created and annihilated almost instantaneously — a process Stephen Hawking used to prove black holes can evaporate. Fill in the blanks.

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A _____ ____ is so named because it’s a hypothetical region of spacetime from which energy can escape but cannot enter. While the concept appears in certain theories of quantum gravity, they haven’t actually been found. Fill in the blanks.