A team of scientists suggests that the Moon is peppered with craters from min black holes – and they might unravel some groundbreaking insights on dark matter. The paper of their findings was published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The team believes that swarms of atom-sized black holes formed shortly after the Big Bang. As these hyper-dense objects traveled throughout the cosmos, they began to spread out – and likely arrived at the solar system, where they might have punctured our Moon.
Evidence of dark matter
The researchers add that these mini-black holes likely crashed into other objects as well, including our planet. Due to Moon’s thin atmosphere, though, it wasn’t as well-guarded against the collisions as Earth.
“In principle, there’s nothing special about the Moon — the only reason we invoke the Moon is because it’s well studied,” Almog Yalinewich, co-author of the paper, told CNET. “Some of the moons of Neptune and Jupiter, or Mercury, could be good candidates.”
The authors believe that evidence of these miniature black holes could provide useful information on dark matter, the elusive stuff that many physicists believe accounts for most of the matter in the universe.
Some astronomers think dark matter is made up of “black holes formed from density fluctuations in the early universe,” according to the paper. If mini-black holes from the beginning of the universe did affect the Moon, they could have left some dark matter behind, and changed the properties of any light-matter they interacted with.
Artemis mission to help find these craters
“You could look for dust of different quartz phases and silicates that you wouldn’t be able to produce [otherwise],” Matt Caplan, co-author of the study, told CNET. “Rock smashing into rock doesn’t get that hot.”
The team believes that future manned missions to the lunar surface, including NASA’s upcoming Artemis program, will hopefully enable them to find and study these craters – and finally give some info about the mysterious nature of dark matter.
Astronomers recently used NASA’s observatory NuSTAR to look for X-rays coming from the core of the nearby star Betelgeuse. It is suggested that this could be a sign that axions, a dark matter particle candidate, are present there.
