Subhi Agrawal
Scientists propose that a tiny black hole may traverse our solar system approximately every decade. This event could be detected by monitoring the wobbling of Mars.
“Reason To Keep Pursuing This Delightful Idea”
This observation is based on the idea that much of the universe’s dark matter consists of tiny black holes.
To test this theory, researchers have been closely monitoring Mars’ orbit. A recent paper in Physical Review D suggests that tiny black holes passing through the solar system could cause Mars to wobble in a detectable way from Earth.
“Given decades of precision telemetry, scientists know the distance between Earth and Mars to an accuracy of about 10 centimetres [4 inches],” said study co-author David Kaiser, professor of physics at MIT, in a statement, reported Wion News.
“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,” he added.
The researchers estimated that one of these tiny black holes is likely to pass through our solar system approximately once per decade.
“Primordial black holes do not live in the solar system. Rather, they’re streaming through the universe, doing their own thing,” said paper co-author Sarah Geller, who is now a postdoc at the University of California at Santa Cruz, in the statement.
“And the probability is, they’re going through the inner solar system at some angle once every 10 years or so,” he further added.
Detecting The Passing Of Black Hole
To detect these black holes, researchers have modeled the orbits of large bodies in the solar system and found that small wobbles in Mars’ orbit could indicate the passage of asteroid-sized black holes.
“State-of-the-art simulations of the solar system include more than a million objects, each of which has a tiny residual effect,” said study co-author, Benjamin Lehmann, who is a researcher at MIT, 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,” he continued.
Such wobbles would be detectable by equipment on Earth.
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,” Kaiser stated.
“Luckily for us, astronomers have been tracking ordinary space rocks for decades as they have flown through our solar system, so we could calculate typical properties of their trajectories and begin to compare them with the very different types of paths and speeds that primordial black holes should follow,” he further stated.
GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings