José Manuel NievesSEGUIRMadrid Updated: Save Send news by mail electrónicoTu name *

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Among the several classes of black holes (supermassive, stellar, intermediate-mass…) there is a particular concern to scientists. This is the “black hole primary”, of much smaller size (from microscopic to just a few km) but with masses that may come to be equivalent to that of a star. Nobody has ever seen one, but theory says that such black holes should have formed in enormous quantities during the first seconds after the Big Bang.

And now, two Spanish researchers, Juan García Bellido and Manuel Trashorras, along with Savvas Nesseris, all of them from the Autonomous University of Madrid, have discovered that these tiny and dark objects could continue to exist in the present Universe, traveling through the Universe in huge groups that are virtually invisible. Your work has just appeared in the server prepublicaciones ArXiv.

In the early Universe, just after the Big Bang, all the matter that exists was compressed into an ardent “soup of particles” so dense that it could have collapsed at many points, and thus give rise to black holes, primordial. If that crowd of millions and millions of small black holes have managed to survive to the present day, may have become even much smaller than they were in the source, so that would be much more difficult to detect black holes, “normal”, which are formed as a result of the gravitational collapse of very large stars, and of course the super, which occupy vast regions in the centers of many galaxies.

5.000 simulations

Garcia-Bellido and his colleagues carried out more than 5,000 computer simulations to try to figure out how they could have evolved those so-called groups of black holes are primordial. In this way, they discovered that at present there could be genuine “clouds” of them, each one with a similar mass to the Sun and just a few km in diameter, stretching over thousands of light years. The eferctos gravity of the inner of the cloud, in addition, it could cause some of them were “expelled” from the group and thrown into the empty space close to 1,000 km per second.

despite this, García-Bellido believes that there is no reason to worry: “The chances that one of these black holes expelled from any group can beat the Solar System in the short-term are one among thousands of millions of billions”.

The scientists also found that both clusters of black holes as those that, after being expelled, they travel free for the Universe should behave in much the same way as the dark matter, that mysterious form of matter that we cannot detect directly (since it emits no radiation whatsoever), and whose presence we can only infer by observing the gravitational effects it causes in the objects that have near.

Garcia-Bellido, if the black holes primordiles are really “out there”, could be the solution to the enigma of dark matter, one of the biggest issues in open science over the last few decades.