Are tiny black holes zipping through our solar system? Scientists hope to find out
LA TimesScientists have studied black holes with the mass of a star for decades. Created just a split second after the Big Bang, these hypothetical black holes would whip quietly through the solar system roughly once every few years, traveling over a hundred times faster than a bullet. “It’s just fantastic that the most conceptually conservative response is to say, ‘It’s just super tiny black holes that were made a split second after the Big Bang,’” said David Kaiser, a physics professor at MIT and an author on the study. The MIT researchers determined, through modeling, that these tiny black holes may have formed from pockets of dense matter that collapsed on themselves immediately following the Big Bang. To put their own minds at ease, the researchers also calculated the likelihood that one of these tiny black holes would strike Earth and found it would only happen roughly once in a billion years.
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