Every decade or so, at least one microscopic black hole might be flying through our solar system, creating minuscule, detectable gravitational distortions.
If astronomers can confirm the existence of these gravitational distortions, their findings may help solve the mystery of dark matter.
Dark matter is not visible to the human eye, and researchers suspect that it makes up about 86 percent of all matter in the cosmos.
It has been suggested that dark matter is composed of unknown particles, but so far, experts have not identified any new particles. Therefore, it is unclear what dark matter might be made of.
Some scientists are studying primordial black holes in an effort to come up with an explanation for dark matter.
Primordial black holes have existed since the beginning of time. Previous research has indicated that they are about the mass of a typical asteroid, which is roughly 110 billion to 110 million billion tons.
“The black holes we consider in our work are at least 10 billion times lighter than the sun and are barely larger in size than a hydrogen atom,” said Sarah Geller, a co-author of the study and a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
In general, black holes emerge when a dense object collapses under the strength of its own gravity. They can remain undetected in the darkness of space unless they give themselves away by ripping apart a star.
Shortly after the Big Bang, random variations in the density of matter caused certain regions of the newborn universe to become dense enough to collapse into black holes.
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