Every once in a while, a story comes along that just makes me giggle, and also forces me to fix some misinformation living in my brain. Consider the microscopic black hole. In my brain, these diminutive creations of the early universe should all have evaporated away thanks to Hawking Radiation. It turns out, however, I was thinking too small. While the tiniest of possible primordial black holes – those measuring hundreds of million tons and smaller – will indeed have evaporated away, those that are a bit bigger – say a billion metric tons or larger – should all still be hanging in spaces smaller than your typical carbon atom.
To be clear – in the earliest years of our universe, tiny black holes may have formed. And some of these sub-atom sized beasts could still be out there.
A group of researchers published a paper in Physics Review D with first author Tung Tran and in this paper they discussed how some of these tiny tiny monsters just might be randomly making their way through our solar system where they have the potential to create tiny tiny amounts of havoc by moving things around with their not so tiny gravity.
In an extreme case, where all dark matter is explained using asteroid mass black holes, there would always be a black hole or 2 passing through our solar system. Most passages would cause no noticeable effects, but they estimate that about once a decade an observable orbital change should occur.
While we haven’t yet seen asteroids or other objects make an unexplained jig in their orbits, this team of researchers believe that the changes we’re looking for should be observable. This will be especially true in the near future as the Rubin Observatory begins its survey. And… if we don’t see any bobbing and weaving worlds… that also tells us asteroid-massed, atom-sized black holes aren’t the only source of the missing dark matter mass we’re looking for.
In my scientific opinion, dark matter is most likely going to turn out to be a mixture of different things, and microscopic monster black holes could be in that mix.