- Primordial black holes the size of a hydrogen molecule may consist of dark matter
- ‘PHBs’ could help prove dark matter exists because their gravity ‘wobbles’ Earth’s orbit
- But a primordial black hole could swallow the entire Earth if it gets too close
- READ MORE: NASA animation shows ‘monstrous’ black holes lurking in every galaxy
Scientists have discovered that some old black holes are changing the Earth’s orbit.
A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) proposed this Swirling masses of matter called primordial black holes (PBHs) fly past our solar system at least once every decade, disrupting planets and moons.
The PBHs, which formed sjust after the Big Bang 12.8 billion years ago, they are the size of a microbe, but have an asteroid density that could cause orbits to ‘wobble’.
The team’s claim suggests that the distances of planets from the Sun or Earth may change over time.
When primordial black holes fly past a planet, physicists calculate, “that planet begins to wobble or rock slightly around the path it took.” Above, simulations show how black holes bend a stellar background and capture light, creating a black hole silhouette or ‘photon ring’
PBHs were proposed in 1947 by astrophysicist Stephen Hawking and his PhD student Bernard Carr, who argued that “lumpy” regions of extra mass could have formed in the universe during the early moments of the Big Bang and turned into black holes as they collapsed. .
But the ancient black holes have yet to be detected in the universe.
The new study is based on the theory that the universe is teeming with PBHs, meaning the objects would have to pass by our cosmic neighborhood.
The universe is teeming with ancient ‘primordial black holes’, formed from swirling masses of matter shortly after the Big Bang, rather than from a dying star, theoretical physicists say
Researchers calculated how close a PBH would have to come within a planet or moon in our solar system to change its motion.
The study used a simulation that included all eight planets, about 300 planetary satellites (such as moons), more than 1.3 million asteroids and nearly 4,000 comets.
And the model also included rogue PBHs.
The team noticed that if someone with the mass of an asteroid were to come within just two astronomical units of the sun, the orbits of planets and moons would fluctuate by up to several meters.
However, researchers noted that the wobble would not destroy our planet.
They are now developing methods to measure these gravitational fluctuations, in an attempt to gather the first concrete evidence proving the long-theorized ‘dark matter’.
Physicists have long calculated that about 85 percent of all matter in the universe is dark matter, but this large amount has never been discovered.
Essentially, their plan is to measure all the gravitational fluctuations that change the distance from Earth to the moon, among many other known orbits within our solar system, to identify any small but dense particles of dark matter that passed by us.