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Researchers at MIT suggest that the microscopic "primordial black holes" could be blasting through our solar system — at a rate of at least once every decade.
These tiny black holes could be extremely dense, they suggest, packing the mass of a sizable asteroid into the space of a single atom, and date back to the very earliest days of the universe, mere moments following the Big Bang.
As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Physical Review D, these alleged visitors could shed new light on the nature of dark matter, which is the hypothetical stuff that scientists believe doesn't interact with light or radiation, but is believed to make up 85 percent of the universe.
The scientists suggest these primordial black holes could account for some if not all of the dark matter. To support their theory, the team proposed looking for tiny wobbles in Mars' orbit, which may be caused by repeated flybys of these tiny primordial black holes.
"Given decades of precision telemetry, scientists know the distance between Earth and Mars to an accuracy of about ten centimeters," said author and MIT physics professor David Kaiser in a statement.
"We're taking advantage of this highly instrumented region of space to try and look for a small effect," he added.
"If we see it, that would count as a real reason to keep pursuing this delightful idea that all of dark matter consists of black holes that were spawned in less than a second after the Big Bang and have been streaming around the universe for 14 billion years."
Thanks to their immense density, these tiny black holes could exert enough gravitational forces on celestial bodies in our solar system to account for at least a portion of dark matter's observed effect on the motion of stars and galaxies.
After doing some back-of-the-envelope math, lead author and Stanford graduate student Tung Tran concluded that if a primordial black hole would pass by within roughly three feet of a person, they would be pushed around 20 feet away in a matter of a single second.
"We extrapolated to see what would happen if a black hole flew by Earth and caused the Moon to wobble a little bit," said Tung in a statement. "The numbers we got were not very clear. There are many other dynamics in the solar system that could act as some sort of friction to cause the wobble to dampen out."
Coauthor and University of California at Santa Cruz postdoc Sarah Geller suggested that while they "do not live in the solar system," they could be ripping through it "at some angle every ten years or so."
Even if such a black hole were to pass within a few hundred million miles of Mars, it could cause the planet's orbit to start wobbling by as much as three feet.
But even if they'd be able to confirm this wobble, the scientists would still have plenty of work to do to confirm the existence of primordial black holes.
"Luckily for us, astronomers have been tracking ordinary space rocks for decades as they have flown through our solar system, so we could calculate typical properties of their trajectories and begin to compare them with the very different types of paths and speeds that primordial black holes should follow," Kaiser said in a statement.
However, spotting them might prove extremely tricky.
"Astronomers are in fact amazingly good at finding even much lighter objects in our solar system, such as small asteroids," Geller told Space.com, "whereas direct observation of a small black hole with a telescope would most likely show nothing at all."
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