Small, all-but-undetectable primordial black holes could be one of the secret sources of mass that contribute to a dark matter. There are great limits to life in open fields, but in recent years, astronomers have asked: what if these black holes are in the hearts of neutron stars?
Gradually, such black holes would damage the neutron star, emitting it from the inside. These hypothesis systems have not yet been tested, but a new introductory paper, published on arXiv and not peer-reviewed, has worked out how long this destruction would take. .
This, in turn, could be used to analyze the normal population of neutron stars to rule out the nature of black holes that are considered a dark case candidate – regardless of whether they are prime, going back to the Big Bang, or black holes formed inside neutron stars. .
Although we do not know what a dark matter is, it is fundamental to our understanding of the Universe: there is not enough that we can find directly – a normal case – to account for on all their weight. In fact, there is so much depth that scientists have worked out about 75 to 80 percent of all dark cases.
There are a number of candidate grains that may be dark. Primordial black holes created just after the Big Bang are not one of the main candidates, because if they were above a certain mass we would have noticed them by now; but, below that level, they would have grown through Hawking radiation emissions long before this time.
Black holes, however, are an attractive candidate for a dark matter: they are also very difficult to find if they just hang out in space just doing nothing. So astronauts are looking for them.
One recently studied idea is the endoparasitic black hole. There are two situations for this. One is that primordial black holes were captured by neutron stars, and sank to the heart. The other is that particles of dark matter are trapped inside a neutron star; if conditions are favorable, these could come together and fall into a black hole.
Those black holes are small, but they wouldn’t be like that. From their relaxed position, wrapped into the neutron star, these tiny black holes would then entertain their guest.
The team of physicists from Bowdoin College and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign worked out the generation rate – that is, the rate at which the black hole would consume the star neutron – for a range of ratios mass of black holes, from three to nine orders of magnitude not as large as the neutron star host.
A neutron has a theoretical mass limit at 2.3 times greater than the Sun, so the black hole masses would extend down to the range of the dwarf planets.
For a non-rotating neutron star hosting a non-spinning black hole, the origin would be spherical. At the team’s calculated assembly levels, black holes as small as 10-21 at times the mass of the sun would harm a neutron star well within the life of the Earth.
This suggests that primordial black holes, from the beginning of Earth, would have completely replaced their host neutron stars by this time. These time zones are in direct conflict with the age of old neutron star populations, the researchers said.
“As an important claim, our findings confirm arguments that use the current number of neutron stars to block both the contribution of primordial black holes to the Earth’s dark matter content, or on dark-grained material that may be black holes at the center of neutron stars after they are captured, “they wrote in their paper.
So the result is another blow for primordial black holes; but it does not completely control endoparasitic black holes. If particles of dark matter grains out there float through space and move them to neutron stars, they could fall into black holes and transform neutron stars into black hole material even as you read this sentence.
And that’s freaking awesome.
The team’s paper was published on arXiv.