NASA Scientist Links The Dark Matter To Primordial Black Holes

A scientist from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center suggests that the intriguing view, which is the dark matter, is made of black holes formed during the first second of the universe's existence, known as primordial black holes may rationalize the surprisingly high masses of merging black holes that were detected last year.

Alexander Kashlinsky, an astrophysicist at NASA Goddard explained that the study is an effort to bring together a broad set of ideas and observations to test how well they fit and the fit is surprisingly good. He further said that if the study is correct, then all galaxies are embedded within a vast sphere of black holes each about 30 times the sun's mass.

Dark matter is an invisible matter that cannot be detected and it is a mysterious substance that is composed mostly of the material universe. It is thought of to be as some form of the massive exotic particle. Dark matter accounts 85 percent of the total mass of the cosmos, according to Forbes.

On the other hand, a black hole is an object whose gravitational pull is so forceful that nothing, not even light can escape it once inside a particular region, which is called the event horizon. The black holes that contain lots of gas and dust such as this Perseus cluster galaxy create immense amounts of X-ray light.

In the study, which was printed in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on May 24, 2016, Kashlinsky examined what might happen if the dark matter composed of a population of black holes similar to those detected by LIGO. According to Forbes, the LIGO observation perceived two black holes that were about 30 solar masses in size. It is hard to comprehend how the LIGO black holes could have developed from either stars or mergers, yet they do fall within the upper range of primordial black hole models. They are also within the mass range that's hardest to rule out as dark matter.

Kashlinsky has looked at the fluctuations in the cosmic infrared background. He compared the infrared fluctuations with the distribution of known sources such as galaxies. He found out that some of the fluctuations couldn't be accounted for by known sources. The scale of these fluctuations corresponds with a dark matter distribution of LIGO-mass black holes. It is possible then that black could elucidate dark matter after all.

Kashlinsky said that future LIGO observing runs will tell much more about the universe's population of black holes, and it won't be long before they will know if the scenario he outlines is either supported or ruled out.