Günther Hasinger, ESA’s director of science, is the study’s second author. The new study’s first author is Nico Cappelluti, a former Yale Center for Astronomy & Astrophysics Prize postdoctoral fellow who is now an assistant professor of physics at the University of Miami. The James Webb telescope’s mission will be to find the first galaxies that formed in the early universe and see stars forming planetary systems.
“What I find personally super exciting about this idea is how it elegantly unifies the two really challenging problems that I work on - that of probing the nature of dark matter and the formation and growth of black holes - and resolves them in one fell swoop,” she added. “Primordial black holes, if they do exist, could well be the seeds from which all supermassive black holes form, including the one at the center of the Milky Way,” Natarajan said. Also, she said, primordial black holes would have had the ability to grow into supermassive black holes by feasting on gas and stars in their vicinity, or by merging with other black holes. Natarajan and her colleagues say their new model shows that the first stars and galaxies would have formed around black holes in the early universe. If most of the primordial black holes were “born” at a size roughly 1.4 times the mass of Earth’s sun, they could potentially account for all dark matter, said Yale professor of astronomy and physics Priyamvada Natarajan, the paper’s theorist. These lumpy areas would collapse into black holes.Īlthough the theory did not gain traction within the wider scientific community - the new study suggests that, if modified slightly, it could have explanatory power after all. At the time, Hawking and Carr argued that in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang, tiny fluctuations in the density of the universe may have created an undulating landscape with “lumpy” regions that had extra mass. The new study, accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, harkens back to a theory first proposed in the 1970s by physicists Stephen Hawking and Bernard Carr. Black holes are found at the centers of most galaxies. A black hole is a point in space where matter is so tightly compacted it creates intense gravity. Physicists have spent years testing a variety of dark matter candidates, including hypothetical particles such as sterile neutrinos, Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPS), and axions.īlack holes, on the other hand, have been observed. If proven true with data from the soon-to-launch James Webb Space Telescope, the discovery would transform scientists’ understanding of the origins and nature of both dark matter and black holes.ĭark matter - which has never been directly observed - is thought to constitute the majority of matter in the universe and act as the unseen scaffolding upon which galaxies form and develop. That’s the implication of a new model of the early universe created by astrophysicists at Yale, the University of Miami, and the European Space Agency (ESA). Primordial black holes created in the first instants after the Big Bang - tiny ones smaller than the head of a pin and supermassive ones covering billions of miles - may account for all of the dark matter in the universe.
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