A new study suggests that a microscopic black hole might pass through our solar system once every decade or so.
The researchers, who published a paper in the journal Physical Review D, made this discovery by observing Mars closely. According to the paper, the tiny black holes generate a gravitational disruption as they pass through, enough to wobble Mars.
David Kaiser, co-author of the study and a professor of physics at MIT, said in a statement:
“Given decades of precision telemetry, scientists know the distance between Earth and Mars to an accuracy of about 10 centimeters (4 inches). We’re taking advantage of this highly instrumented region of space to try and look for a small effect. If we see it, that would count as a real reason to keep pursuing this delightful idea that all of dark matter consists of black holes that were spawned in less than a second after the Big Bang and have been streaming around the universe for 14 billion years.”
The tiny black hole and dark matter
Dark matter is a form of invisible matter that makes up more of the known universe than regular matter. It doesn’t emit or absorb light, which makes it hard to detect. However, dark matter causes gravitational disruptions, and that is how scientists detect it.
If researchers are able to confirm the presence of these tiny black holes, it can further research on the mystery of dark matter. Scientists believe dark matter could be the presence of black holes that have existed since the Big Bang.
The black holes that researchers would be looking into for this are incredibly small.
“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,” Sarah Geller, co-author of the study and a theoretical physicist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, told Space.com.
Proving primordial black holes
If researchers want to prove the theory of primordial black holes, they have to confirm that the wobble they saw of Mars wasn’t caused by another source like a passing asteroid.
“State-of-the-art simulations of the solar system include more than a million objects, each of which has a tiny residual effect,” study co-author and researcher at MIT Benjamin Lehmann said in the statement. “But even modeling two dozen objects in a careful simulation, we could see there was a real effect that we could dig into.”
David Kaiser dove more into what they would need to find to prove the theory. In the statement, Kaiser said, “We need as much clarity as we can of the expected backgrounds, such as the typical speeds and distributions of boring space rocks, versus these primordial black holes.”
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