In the first quintillionth of a second, the universe may have sprouted microscopic black holes with enormous amounts of nuclear charge, MIT physicists propose. The gravitational pull from these tiny, invisible objects could potentially explain all the dark matter that we can't see today.
In the first quintillionth of a second, the universe may have sprouted microscopic black holes with enormous amounts of nuclear chargeIn the first quintillionth of a second, the universe may have sprouted microscopic black holes with enormous amounts of nuclear charge, MIT physicists propose. The gravitational pull from these tiny, invisible objects could potentially explain all the dark matter that we can't see today.
These smallest,"super-charged" black holes would have been an entirely new state of matter, which likely evaporated a fraction of a second after they spawned. Yet they could still have influenced a key cosmological transition: the time when the first atomic nuclei were forged. The physicists postulate that the color-charged black holes could have affected the balance of fusing nuclei, in a way that astronomers might someday detect with future measurements.
"People have studied what the distribution of black hole masses would be during this early-universe production but never tied it to what kinds of stuff would have fallen into those black holes at the time when they were forming," Kaiser explains.The MIT physicists looked first through existing theories for the likely distribution of black hole masses as they were first forming in the early universe.
Quarks and gluons are the fundamental building blocks of protons and neutrons -- elementary particles that combined to forge the basic elements of the periodic table. Immediately following the Big Bang, physicists estimate, based on QCD, that the universe was an immensely hot plasma of quarks and gluons that then quickly cooled and combined to produce protons and neutrons.
Astrophysics Astronomy Dark Matter Stars Big Bang Galaxies Cosmology
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