Scientists Suggest Tiny Black Holes Are Regularly Cruising Through Our Star System

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Primordial Black Holes: Tiny Cosmic Visitors in Our Solar System?

Researchers at MIT suggest that 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, packing the mass of a sizable asteroid into the space of a single atom. They are thought to date back to the very earliest moments of the universe, mere instants after the Big Bang.

Connecting to Dark Matter

As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Physical Review D, these hypothetical visitors could shed new light on the nature of dark matter—the invisible substance that scientists believe makes up roughly 85 percent of the universe’s total mass and does not interact with light or electromagnetic radiation.

The scientists propose that primordial black holes could account for some, or even all, of the dark matter. To test the idea, the team suggests searching for tiny, unexplained wobbles in Mars’ orbit that might be caused by repeated close flybys of these dense objects.

“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.”

“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.”

Gravitational Effects and Detection Challenges

Thanks to their extreme density, these primordial black holes could exert measurable gravitational influence on planets and other bodies, potentially explaining part of dark matter’s observed effect on the motion of stars and galaxies.

Lead author and Stanford graduate student Tung Tran calculated that a primordial black hole passing within roughly three feet of a person could displace them about 20 feet in a single second. When the team modeled a similar flyby near Earth that might perturb the Moon’s orbit, the predicted wobble proved difficult to isolate from other solar-system dynamics.

Co-author and University of California, Santa Cruz postdoc Sarah Geller noted that while the black holes do not reside permanently in the solar system, they could still cross it “at some angle every ten years or so.” Even a passage within a few hundred million miles of Mars might induce a detectable orbital wobble of up to three feet.

Astronomers have tracked ordinary asteroids for decades, providing a baseline of typical trajectories against which the much faster, more eccentric paths of primordial black holes could be compared. However, direct telescopic detection remains extremely challenging.

“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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