Black hole 'bullets' fired at Mars could reveal more about dark matter

[Admin]

Tiny black hole "bullets" left over from the Big Bang could be passing through Mars at speeds in excess of 7,000 times the speed of sound, causing the Red Planet to "wobble."

Black hole 'bullets' fired at Mars could reveal more about dark matter : Read more

 

[Torbjorn Larsson]

Primordial black holes are too scarce to explain dark matter​

A decades-long survey of a nearby galaxy has detected signals consistent with ancient black holes that could explain dark matter — but the objects would have to be at least ten times more abundant to support the theory.

Specifically, they considered a range of PBHs with masses ranging from 1.8 × 10–4 times to 6.3 times that of the Sun. They found that these black holes comprise no more than 1% of the inferred abundance of dark matter. Widening the mass range to between 1.3 × 10–5 and 860 solar masses upped the contribution of PBHs to no more than 10%.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02526-y

 

[Fruitmaniac]

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02526-y

Aren't PBHs the best explanation for supermassive black holes, which couldn't have formed as stellar black holes?

 

[Fruitmaniac]

That's a great idea but wouldn't it be easier to measure Earth's wobble?

 

[Unclear Engineer]

This article talks about measuring "wobbles" in Mars' orbit due to a black hole the mass of an asteroid passing within "a few hundred million miles of Mars" about once every 10 years. I really question the ability to determine that the effect was not from one of the many real asteroids that are within that distance from Mars in the asteroid belt and outside that belt, too, plus other visitors like comets.

And, why are these primordial black holes going to be traveling at 5.4 million miles per hour? That is more than 4 times the escape velocity from our galaxy, starting from Earth.

Finding one unexplained wobble about every 10 years, and being able to imagine any black hole mass passing at any distance from Mars to "explain" it seems like it would have extremely low credibility for a theory.

 

[Questioner]

I, in my infinite wisdom hypothesize BHs collapse into the past.
In the early universe there was little or no past to collapse into.
Therefore there could only be trivial BHs if any at that early stage of the universe.