Dark matter could produce faint flashes of light when it interacts with tiny black holes, according to new theoretical research. These flashes from black holes could one day help scientists detect and study the mysterious matter that has so far remained invisible.
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Dark matter makes up the vast majority of the mass of almost every galaxy in the universe, but its exact nature still eludes scientists. It has gravity, but it doesn't interact with light or produce light itself, so we only have circumstantial evidence of its existence through gravitational interactions with everything else.
Under these circumstances, researchers are considering any scenario that could make dark matter more visible. So they thought of black holes. But how could black holes, which devour any light that gets too close to them, make dark matter shine? The researchers have created a scenario that might make it possible. They reported their findings on September 20 on the arXiv.
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Researchers , in principle, interact with normal matter (and produce light in the process), but for some reason, it usually doesn't. Perhaps the interaction requires a certain amount of energy that is simply unavailable or forbidden without an intermediary particle to do the work. Black holes could provide the avenue needed to overcome these obstacles and illuminate dark matter.
However, only extremely tiny primordial black holes can reveal invisible matter. These black holes are not the remains of giant stars, but the remnants of chaotic times in the extremely early universe, when matter and energy spontaneously compressed to create them. Primordial black holes were first proposed by Stephen Hawking, but observations have so far failed to find any. If they exist, they are extremely unusual.
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This radiation emitted by black holes is not just packets of light, or photons. It is almost every kind of particle, including dark matter particles. As primordial black holes decay, they emit dark matter particles that then activate any surrounding dark matter particles in their vicinity, setting off a cascade that can briefly release visible light.
Source: livescience
