On the night of November 23, 2014, a powerful Mauna Kea telescope in Hawaii was trying to detect the enigmatic movements of a black hole crossing space. In the seven hours the telescope looked at the cosmos, it may have captured one, as an Earth-sized structure eclipsed a star from our nearest galactic neighbor, Andromeda, about 2.5 million years ago. light away. Amid the 188 relatively soft images taken from the galaxy that night, the black hole candidate event was a moment of literal enlightenment.
“When it is right along the line of sight, the light bends [the black hole]. Not only the rays of light that point to your stay, but also those that would have passed in front of you will bend towards you, “said Alexander Kusenko, an astrophysicist at UCLA and the Kavli Institute for “Physics and Mathematics of the Universe.” Will make the star look brighter for a second. It’s a bit counterintuitive. “
Kusenko is the lead author of a recent article on the event, published in the journal Physical Review Letters in October. Research suggests that between some and all of the dark matter in the universe could be explained by primordial black holes – hypothesized small, very old versions of the classic cosmic character that was just direct image for the first time in 2019. All black holes, regardless of their size, are celestial objects that exert so much gravitational force that nothing, not even light, can escape.
One idea is that at the beginning of the universe, slight fluctuations in density in the incredibly dense inflatable universe would have been enough to generate black holes in the pre-stellar plasma, especially if they interacted with heavy particles by some unknown force. . (Known black holes that run are usually formed from sinking stars.)
“If you take a tablespoon of primordial plasma, it’s almost a black hole,” Kusenko said, referring to the initial density of the universe. “Press it a little and the light wouldn’t escape.”
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Some of these theoretical black holes would have been of some critical size, according to Einstein’s theory of gravity, to be perceived as continuously expanding an observer within the black hole, while maintaining a static size for the outside observer. This idea may generate notions of “childish universes” within ours, but keep in mind that primordial black holes are merely theoretical at the moment.
And this is the immediate concern of Kusenko’s team: to prove its existence. The primordial black holes should be numerous if they were a part of the dark matter of the universe (mysterious things that seem to make up about 27% of the universe), but too small to be detectable, as theirs have been. confirmed counterparts.
Kusenko and colleagues (in the October newspaper that included researchers from UCLA and Kavli IPMU) are projecting a wide network for black hole candidates using the Hyper Suprime-Cam, a nearly 6-foot barrel of lens of length attached to the mirror the Subaru telescope at Mauna Kea. The camera is able to imagine the entire Andromeda galaxy every few minutes. Since a candidate for a primordial black hole was chosen during the seven-hour tour of the cosmos in 2014, Kusenko hopes future observations can pick up more events to unpack.
The 2014 observation was not easy to find in all the data. That team narrowed down a catalog of more than 15,000 candidate stars to check for light distortions, and in the process found about 50 “impostor” events, caused by bright stars, among other things. An impostor was even caused by a passing asteroid. But after a bunch of star orders, one candidate seemed in good faith.
If more candidate events are identified, there will be more clue to the team theory of many miniature black holes explaining the excess severity measured in many galaxies (it is that additional gravity that tipped scientists toward the existence of dark matter in the 1970s). To put things in perspective, the smallest known black holes are in the range of 5 solar masses (i.e., five times the size of the Sun). The recent black hole candidate was only the size of our planet.
If an Earth-sized black hole seems hard to believe, well, it’s not even the smallest black hole proposed. Last year, physicists suggested one ball-sized black hole to explain a hypothetical object in our solar system known as the New Planet.
Kusenko’s team did another round of observations on Mauna Kea in late 2020, and now they have to make the effort to review the data. We could know by the end of this year if they found possible black holes—And your fingers are firmly crossed to get good news.