On the night of November 23, 2014, a powerful telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii attempted to select the enigmatic movements of a black hole traveling through space. In the last seven hours of the telescope at the cosmos, it may have caught one, as a structure about the size of Earth orbiting a star in our nearest galactic neighbor, Andromeda, had about 2.5 million lights -year away. Among the 188 relatively bare photographs taken of the galaxy that night, the candidate black hole event was a moment of literal enlightenment.
“When it’s right across the scene, the light bends around [the black hole]. It’s not just the rays of light that aim to be with you, but also the ones that would have passed bending towards you, ”said Alexander Kusenko, a psychologist at UCLA and the Kavli Institute for Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, in video call. “It makes the star appear brighter for a second. It’s a bit of an afterthought. ”
Kusenko is the lead author of a recent paper on the event, published in the journal Physical Review Letters in October. The research suggests that between some and the dark matter of the universe could be explained by primordial black holes – petite hypotheses and very old versions of the classical cosmic character that were just designed directly for the first time in 2019. All black holes, no matter their size, are square objects that give so much gravitational force that nothing, not even light, can escape from them.
One idea is that, at the beginning of the universe, small density changes in the densely packed universe would have been sufficient to seed black holes out of the pre-stellar plasma, especially if they are interacted with heavy particles through an unknown force. (Running the mill, recognizable black holes are usually formed from falling stars.)
“If you take a spoonful of pristine plasma, it ‘s almost like a black hole,” Kusenko said, referring to the original density of the universe. “Delete it a little, and no light will escape.”
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Some of these theoretical black holes of a certain size, according to Einstein’s theory of gravitation, would be seen as a continuous extension to an observer inside the black hole – as long as they remained as a static size to the person -outside viewing. This idea may be spawning ideas of “baby globes” within ourselves, but keep in mind that primary black holes are just theoretical at the moment.
And that is the immediate concern of Kusenko ‘s team: proving their existence. Primordial black holes would have to be numerous if they were to account for some of the dark matter of the universe – a mysterious material that seems to make up about 27% of the universe – but too small for to be discovered, as their peers are convinced.
Kusenko and his colleagues (in the October paper featuring researchers from UCLA and Kavli IPMU) cast a wide net for black hole candidates using the Hyper Suprime-Cam, a near-barrel lens at 6 feet long attached to the nearly 30-foot mirror of the Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea. The camera is able to capture the entire Andromeda galaxy every few minutes. Since one candidate for a primordial black hole was selected in the seven-hour cycle of the cosmos back in 2014, Kusenko hopes that future ideas will be able to gather more events to demystify them. .
The 2014 survey was not easy to find in all data. That team reduced a catalog of more than 15,000 candidate stars to study for mild warming, and in the process found nearly 50 “impostor” events, caused by bright stars, among other things. One impostor was even caused by a passing asteroid. But after plenty of star sorting, one candidate looked bonafide-like.
If more candidate events are identified, there will be more runways for the team’s theory of many small black holes accounting for the too much gravity measured in many galaxies (it was this extra pressure that led scientists away to dark matter back in the 1970s). To put things in perspective, the smallest known black holes in the realm are 5 solar masses (i.e., five times the size of the sun). The recent candidate black hole was just the size of our planet.
If it’s hard to believe a black hole the size of the Earth, well, that’s not even the smallest black hole recommended. Last year, physics proposed a black hole the size of a bowling ball to explain a hypothetical subject in our solar system called Planet Nine.
Kusenko’s team conducted another round of ideas at Mauna Kea at the end of 2020, and they now need to do the detailed work of filtering through the data. We may know later this year if they find any possible black holes—And our fingers are firmly cut for good news.