Scientists may have found an answer to the mystery of dark matter: to their surprise, there is a byproduct of the first half of a second of the Big Bang! [videos]

About 50 years ago, the scientific community faced a specific problem: There is not enough visible matter in the universe.

All the matter we can see — stars, planets, cosmic dust, and everything in between — can’t explain why the universe behaves the way it does, and for the researchers’ observations to make sense, there would have to be five times more matter. According to NASA.

Scientists call it dark matter because it does not interact with light and is invisible.

In the 1970s, American astronomers Vera Rubin and Kent Ford confirmed the existence of dark matter by observing stars orbiting at the edge of spiral galaxies. They noticed that these stars were moving too fast to be held together by the galaxy’s visible matter and gravity, and they should have flown away.

The only explanation was that there was a large amount of invisible matter holding the galaxy together.

“What you see in a spiral galaxy is not what is there,” Rubin said at the time. Her work was based on a hypothesis formulated by Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s that launched a search for invisible matter.

• Since then, scientists have been trying to observe dark matter directly, and have even built large devices to detect it, but so far to no avail.

At the beginning of the research was the famous British physicist Stephen Hawking He hypothesized that dark matter could be hiding in black holes—the main subject of his work—that formed during the Big Bang.

And now, a new study conducted by researchers at MIT [ΜΙΤ] He brought this theory back to the fore, revealing the matter that these primordial black holes are made of, and perhaps discovering an entirely new type of exotic black hole.

“It was a really nice surprise,” said David Keyser, one of the study’s authors.

“We were using Stephen Hawking’s famous calculations about black holes, especially his important result about the radiation emitted by black holes,” Keizer said. “These strange black holes arise from trying to deal with the dark matter problem. They are a byproduct of the interpretation of dark matter.”

The first half of a second

Scientists have made many speculations about what dark matter is, ranging from unknown particles to extra dimensions. But Hawking’s theory about black holes only recently came into effect.

“People didn’t take it seriously until maybe 10 years ago,” said study co-author Elba Alonso Monsalve, a graduate student at MIT. “This is because black holes seemed really far-fetched. In the early 1900s, people thought they were just a fun mathematical fact, not just a physical fact.”

• We now know that almost every galaxy has a black hole at its center, and Einstein’s discovery of gravitational waves generated by black holes in 2015 by researchers – a landmark – made clear that they are everywhere.

“In fact, the universe is full of black holes,” Alonso Monsalve said. “But no dark matter particle was found, even though people looked in all the places they expected to find it. This does not mean that dark matter is not a particle or that it is definitely black holes. It could be a combination of both. But now, it is “Taking black holes as dark matter filters seriously.”

Other recent studies have confirmed Hawking’s hypothesis, but recent work by Alonso Monsalvi and Keyser, professor of physics and the history of science at MIT, goes further and examines exactly what happened when Neanderthal black people first formed wormholes.

The study, published June 6 in the journal Physical Review Letters, reveals that these black holes must have appeared in the first half a second of the Big Bang:

“It is very early, much earlier than the time when protons and neutrons were formed, the particles that make up everything,” Alonso Monsalve said.

He added that in our everyday world, we cannot find protons and neutrons decaying, and they act as elementary particles. However, we know they are not, because they are made up of smaller particles called quarks, held together by other particles called gluons.

• ““You can’t find quarks and gluons alone and free in the universe now, because it’s too cold,” he added. “But early in the Big Bang, when it was very hot, they could be found alone and freely. So primordial black holes formed by freely absorbing quarks and gluons.”

Such a configuration would make them radically different from the astrophysical black holes that scientists typically observe in the universe, which are the result of collapsing stars.

The primordial black hole would also be much smaller, with only the asteroid’s mass, on average, condensed to the size of one atom. But if enough of these primordial black holes did not evaporate at the beginning of the Big Bang and do not survive to this day, they could form all or most of the dark matter.

Long term signature

While primordial black holes were forming, another, previously unobserved type of black hole must have formed as a sort of byproduct. According to the study. It should have been smaller, just like the mass of a rhinoceros, condensed into less than the size of a proton.

These tiny black holes, because of their small size, can acquire a rare and strange property from the quark-gluon “soup” in which they are formed, called “color charge.” It is a state of charge that is limited to quarks and gluons, and is never found in ordinary objects, Keyser said.

This color charge would make it unique among black holes, which usually have no charge of any kind.

“It is inevitable that these smaller black holes would have also formed, as a byproduct (of the formation of primordial black holes), but they no longer exist today because they would have already evaporated,” Alonso Monsalve said. “.

• However, if it was still about ten millionths of a second away from the Big Bang, when protons and neutrons formed, it could have left observable signatures by changing the balance between the two types of particles.

“The balance between the number of protons and the number of neutrons created is very delicate and depends on what other matter existed in the universe at the time. He added: “If these black holes with a colored charge were still around, they could have changed the balance between protons and neutrons (in favor of “One or the other, if we can only measure it in the next few years.”

The measurement could come from ground-based telescopes or sensitive instruments on orbiting satellites, Keizer said. He added that there may be another way to confirm the existence of these strange black holes.

“The formation of a cluster of black holes is an extremely violent process that would send massive ripples through the surrounding space-time. They will decay over the course of cosmic history, but not to zero,” Kaiser said.

• “The next generation of gravitational sensors could glimpse low-mass black holes — an exotic state of matter that was an unexpected byproduct of more mundane black holes that could explain today’s dark matter.”

Many forms of dark matter

What does this mean for ongoing experiments trying to detect dark matter, such as the LZ dark matter experiment in South Dakota?

“The idea of ​​strange new particles remains an interesting hypothesis,” Keizer said. There are other types of large experiments, some under construction, looking for ways to detect gravitational waves. They may already be picking up some stray signals from the extremely violent formation process of primordial black holes.

Alonso Monsalvi added that there is also the possibility that primordial black holes are just a small portion of dark matter.

“It doesn’t really have to be the same,” he said. “There’s five times as much dark matter as there is ordinary matter, and ordinary matter is made up of a whole bunch of different particles. Why should dark matter be a unique type of object?”

Primordial black holes regained popularity with the discovery of gravitational waves, but little is known about their formation, according to Nikos Capelloti, an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Miami.

“This work is an interesting and viable option to explain elusive dark matter,” Capellotti said.

The study is exciting and suggests a new formation mechanism for the first generation of black holes, said Priyamvada Natarajan, the Joseph S. and Sophia S. Fruton Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Yale University.

“All the hydrogen and helium in our universe today were created in the first three minutes, and if there had been enough of these primordial black holes by then, they would have influenced this process and these effects might have been detectable.” said Natarajan. .

“The fact that this is an observationally controlled hypothesis is what I find really exciting, as well as the fact that this suggests that nature may be creating black holes starting in the most ancient times via multiple paths.”

With information from CNN

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