Scientists Discover an Unexpected Byproduct Hinting at a Completely New Type of Exotic Black Hole

Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have revisited Stephen Hawking’s theory that black holes that were created in the early cosmos, the primordial black holes could be the source of dark matter. They indicate that these black holes originated at the first quintillionth of a second after Big Bang absorbing the free quarks and gluons unlike other black holes that form out of the collapsed stars.

This process may produce black holes with other characteristics, for example color charge thus give black holes characteristics of the present day black holes. If such tiny black holes did not evaporate in the early Universe they might still be seen in the number of protons and neutrons in the present Universe or through gravitational waves.

For about half a century, scientists have grappled with a significant issue: According to the current account of cosmology, to explain the state of the world, the amount of visible matter in the universe isn’t sufficient.

This means that all the seen matter including stars, planets, dust particles, and the lot cannot explain the correct behavior of the universe. NASA also states that in order to have paralleled observations similar to those of researchers, there has to be five times more matter present. There is this other matter, called dark matter that scientists claim is out there but cannot be seen since it doesn’t reflect, absorb or emit light.

Two American astronomers, Vera Rubin and W. Kent Ford in 1980s, in fact, established the finding of dark matter when observing stars at the edges of spiral galaxies during the 1970s. They found out that these stars were moving very fast that they should be flying away from each other due to gravitational forces and amount of material they observed within the galaxy. The only possible explanation was that there existed a lot of dark matter that held the galaxy together.

”What you see in a spiral galaxy,” Rubin said at the time, “is not what you get. ” Her work extended from a hypothesis in the 1930 with the Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky and paved the way for the search of this substance.

After that, people attempted at observing dark matter directly and some experimenters even built large detectors for this purpose, but all in vain.

During this search early in this search, renowned British physicist Stephen Hawking assumed that dark matter was present in black hole produced during the Big Bang that was one of his specialties.

This theory has recently been revived by a research conducted by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that looked into the origin of black holes, the contents of Primordial Black Holes and possibly a new type of black hole.

This is according to the findings of the recent study as expressed by David Kaiser, one of the people who conducted the study.

“We were using the calculations of Stephen Hawking about black holes, or more specifically, new discoveries that he made regarding radiation emitted by them,” according to Kaiser. “These =exotic black holes are created, not as a result of theoretical calculations of black holes, but as a part of calculation for dark matter. ”

The first quintillionth of a second

There are several hypotheses that attributes the nature of dark matter including unknown particles and even more dimensions. However, the general Hawking’s black hole theory is not so old, and only now, it has started receiving the attention it deserves.

‘It would not have been considered, I would say, a completely serious matter till maybe 10 years ago,’ said Elba Alonso-Monsalve, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “This is because, at one time, the black hole was believed to be one of the most elusive objects in the universe; in the early part of the 20th century scientists spoke of it as a mathematical phantom, not a real physical object. ”

Now it is a fact that almost every galaxy has a black hole at its center, and after years of high expectation finally in 2015, physicists detected the gravitational waves generated from two merging black holes further solidifying the existence of these enigmatic objects all around the universe.

“As a matter of fact, there are numerous black holes through out the universe,” commented Alonso-Monsalve. “But after going through much effort needed to look for it, the dark matter particle has not been found to exist in any of those areas that scientists believed could possibly harbor it. This does not mean that dark matter is a particle; or that it cannot be black holes. One is likely to be a mixture of both, of late, black holes are looked at much more seriously when it comes to dark matter. ”

Although other studies have corroborated Hawking’s hypothesis, the authors of this study and David Kaiser, a physics professor at MIT and the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science, take a closer look at the process of formation of primordial black holes.

The study, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, suggests that these black holes formed within the first quintillionth of a second after the Big Bang: “That is really early, much earlier than the formation of protons and neutrons, the particles that make up everything,” Alonso-Monsalve went on.

A long-lasting signature

Another type of black holes that have not been detected earlier, according to the conducted study, would also have emerged alongside the PBHs. These would have been even smaller — about the size of a rhinoceros, concentrated about 10,000 times less than a single cubic millimeter.

These tiny black holes would have been capable to gain one of the rarest property known as ‘color charge’ from the quark-gluon soup they formed in due to their small size. There is nothing like it in normal objects at all, Kaiser said of this charge, which is unique to quarks and gluons.

This color charge would make it differ with other black holes that ordinarily do not possess any kind of charge at all. “It’s inevitable that such even lighter black holes would have also formed, as a side product (from the formation of primordial black holes),” Alonso-Monsalve said, “there won’t be any of them present in today’s universe because they have already evaporated. ”

On the other hand, if such tiny black holes did indeed exist at an age of ten millionths of a second after big bang when protons and neutrons were formed, then there could be a possible signal because they altered the ratio between these two particles.

“As to what ratio was the protons and neutrons created, it is very much sensitive to what else was in existence in the early universe at that time If these black holes with color charges were still around, they may have skewed the ratio of protons vs. neutrons (or vice versa) to a comparable extent, enough in fact that in the next few years we could measure it. ”

This measurement could be achieved using ground based telescopes or a sensitive instrument aboard a satellite, according to Kaiser. But there may be another method to confirm these exotic black holes’ existence.

“Creating a population of black holes is quite a violent process that creates shocks which propagate through the surrounding space-time,” “It is true that those get eroded through cosmic evolution but they do not cancel out entirely,” Kaiser noted. “The next generation of gravitational detectors could perhaps get a glimpse of the small mass black holes — an exotic state of matter that was an unintended predictive off shoot of the black holes that are conceivable that explain the enigmatic dark matter in the today’s universe.

Many forms of dark matter

What does this mean for continued efforts to seek out dark matter, for instance by the LZ Dark Matter Experiment in South Dakota?

“The assertion that there are new exotic particles out there is still a rather attractive theory,” Kaiser said. “There are other big interferometers still in construction that are targeting at experimenting with different approaches to detect gravitational waves: These may well indeed capture some of the interference signals originating from the violent formation processes of isolated primordial black holes.

Alonso-Monsalve also said that although the resulting offshoots may be primordial black holes, they may not make up the entire dark matter. ‘It does not need to be like that,’ she said. “Then you remember that there is five times as much dark matter as the normal matter and the normal matter is made up of so many particles, why must the dark matter be one type of object?”

Speculation on the formation of these black holes has recently been rekindled in the discovery of gravitational waves; however, some aspects of formation remain still unclear, said Nico Cappelluti, an assistant professor at the University of Miami physics department who did not partake in the study.

“In my opinion, this work offers an interesting and realistic possibility to explain the mysterious dark matter,” Cappelluti added.

Priyamvada Natarajan, the Joseph S. and Sophia S. Fruton Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University, who also was not involved in the study, called the attempt innovative to present a mechanism for the formation of the first black holes.

“In fact, all the hydrogen and helium that exist in our universe today were born in the first three minutes. If enough of these primordial black holes was present at that time, it could have affected that process and its effects may be detectable by us,” Natarajan said.

“I think the best thing about this hypothesis is that it can be subjected to observation and this hypothesis indicates that nature may be creating black holes through a variety of routes from the earliest time. ”

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