Researchers have discovered a surprising side effect that hints at a completely novel category of exotic black hole.

For about 50 years, the scientific community has been grappling with a substantial problem: There isn’t enough visible matter in the universe.

These known components include scientifically observable objects such as stars, planets and cosmic dust and NASA has stated that these constituents of the visible universe are inadequate to elucidate on the functioning of the universe. This indicates that for one to account for the findings by the researchers, there could be five times the volume of matters that could not be seen or as they interact with light.

This is a material that is a complete mystery; it is referred to as dark matter. A couple of American astronomers, Vera Rubin and Ford W Kent in the 1970s provided evidence that supported the existence of dark matters by researching and analyzing stars that revolved around the spiral galaxies’ outer rim. They noted that each of these stars was moving in a manner that implies it should be able to escape the gravitational pull of the visible mass of the galaxy, yet they are all held together The implication of this is that there had to be a large amount of dark matter present in the galaxy.

In 2000 Rubin speculated that the observed parts of the spiral galaxy do not represent the real picture at all. Her work contributed to further development of the concepts of Fritz Zwicky, a Swiss astronomer, who drew the attention of scientists to this element back in the 1930s. Since then, many efforts have been made by scientists and researchers to find dark matter and they have gone to an extent of developing big detectors in a bid to capture them but have failed.

When science was initially seeking clues about this matter, none other than the famous British physicist Stephen Hawking proposed that dark matter could be hidden in black holes that arose simultaneously with the birth of the universe and in which Hawking devoted a lot of research.

Some smart folks from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology kindly decided to reanimate the hypothesis and conduct a study, which could explain the composition of primordial black holes and even show that we are dealing with a new type of exotic black hole. One of the authors of the study, David Kaiser, shared his joy and said: “It was quite a pleasant shock. “ The considered study made significant reliance on Stephen Hawking’s black holes calculations, paying more attention to his calculations of the radiation black holes release. Said Kaiser, ”These exotic black holes are what we got when trying to solve the dark matter riddle – they are the price we pay for the attempts to understand the dark matter phenomenon. ”

The first quintillionth of a second

There are several theories that have been proposed by scientists to explain the attributes of dark matter some of which include undiscovered particle types and parallel universes. However, the hypothesis given to black holes by Hawking has come to the limelight over the recent past. In Elba Alonso-Monsalve’s opinion, who is a co-author of the research and a graduate student at MIT, people started considering the existence of black holes only around ten years ago. At the beginning of the 20th century, black holes were actually treated as a mathematical idea and not a real object. Today we have realized that nearly every galaxy includes a black hole.

The detection of gravitational waves for the first time by Einstein this year, as black holes’ collision in 2015, marked a significant step as more proof of their existence. Alonso-Monsalve also elaborated that in actuality, the universe is teeming with black holes. However, up to the present, the actual dark matter particle has not been discovered, despite thorough searches. This does not mean that dark matter is not a particle or is made only of black holes. Possibly it is both the factors combined in some measure.

However, the scientific community of the present days is paying a great deal of attention to the potential role of black holes as dark matter. Subsequent works have offered more evidence backing Hawking’s hypothesis. However, Alonso-Monsalve and Kaiser, a physics professor, and the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science at MIT go a step further by exploring the formation of other primordial black holes and their consequences.

According to the study conducted by researchers that conducted study and published in Physical Review Letters journal on June 6, such black holes were formed within the first quintillionth of a second of the formation of the universe. They assert that this time scale is much earlier than when protons and neutrons, which are particles that make up matter, were formed, attributes it to Alonso-Monsalve.

The author emphasized the idea that although protons and neutrons are first particles, they are inseparable in our daily lives as suggested by Alonso-Monsalve. This comes from the fact that these particles are formed from particles called quarks which are held together by particles called gluons. It is important to note that in the current universe of the standard model quarks and gluons cannot exist independently due to low temperature.

However, in Early Big Bang when the heat is at its peak and the density is extremely high, these particles can exist independently. Due to these circumstances the formation of primordial black holes occurred through the consumption of free quarks and gluons. Black holes themselves are not created through astrophysical processes, such as the core-collapse of massive stars as astrophysical black holes are typically perceived by scientists. They would be so miniscule, occupying just as much space as an asteroid is in size, but would consist of just one atom.

Since dark matter is such an enigmatic entity that cannot be detected or studied directly, it could be that many of these surviving primordial black holes can provide all of the dark matter necessary for the universe today.

A long-lasting signature

A new type of black hole which had been previously unknown existed during the formation of the primordial black holes, as the study reveals. Whereas these newly discovered black holes would have been far smaller in size and would have had a mass comparable to that of a rhinoceros packed into a region the size of a single proton.

The color charge, which is peculiar to quarks and gluons and non-existent in usual matter, may have been adopted by these miniature black holes from quark-gluon plasma from which they evolved, originally, unlike usual black holes which are, as a rule, electrically neutral. Alonso-Monsalve points out that such even smaller black holes would have been inevitably created as the by-products of the formation of the PBHs and, however, they would have already evaporated at the time when they no longer exist.

However, if such black holes existed around ten millionths of a second after the Big Bang when protons and neutrons were formed, they may have modified the balance between these particles and be therefore observable. The exact balance between the formation of protons and neutron depends with the cosmic condition at that particular period. If the coloured black holes were still existent in the world then there could have been a little change in the probablity of creation of one type of particles over the other and this change could be measured in future.

Kaiser proposes that this measurement can be done with telescopes on ground or highly sensitive devices on orbiting satellites. Moreover, Kaiser pointed out that there may be other ways to verify the existence of such strange black holes.

“Creating a population of black holes is a violent process that will cause massive vibrations in the surrounding space-time. “Those would be attenuated over cosmic history, but not to zero,” Kaiser explained. “The next generation of gravitational detectors could catch a glimpse of the small-mass black holes — an exotic state of matter that was an unexpected byproduct of the more mundane black holes that could explain dark matter today.”

Many forms of dark matter

Citing Kaiser, it is implied that the ongoing experiments including the LZ Dark Matter Experiment in South Dakota may be influenced by the presence of exotic new particles. He also noted that other massive experiments such as the ones looking for gravitational waves could possibly see signals from the violent formation process of primordial black holes. As a possible explanation, Alonso-Monsalve noted that PBHs could make up only some part of dark matter, pointing to the variety of particles that are a part of ordinary matter.

According to Cappelluti, the work could be an interesting possibility for the description of dark matter, and Natarajan suggested a special scenario for the formation of the first generation of black holes. Natarajan also spoke about the effect of the primordial black holes concerning hydrogen and helium formation in the early universe, claiming that effects of such phenomena can be observed.

She described herself as thrilled that this hypothesis is observationally amenable and that nature must have formed black holes in at least several ways from the beginning.

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