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Have astronomers found a new class of tiny black hole?
Black holes are the cosmic champions of hide-and-seek. Einstein predicted they existed in 1916, but it took over 100 years before a telescope as wide as the world snapped the first picture of a black hole. They're elusive beasts, avoiding detection because they swallow up light. Even so, astronomers can see the tell-tale signs of black holes in the universe by studying different forms of radiation, like X-rays. So far, that's worked -- and a huge number of black holes have been discovered by looking for these signs.
However, an entirely new detection method, pioneered by researchers at The Ohio State University, suggests there may be a whole population of black holes we've been missing.
The findings, published in the journal Science on Nov. 1, detail the discovery of a black hole orbiting the giant star 2MASS J05215658+4359220 (J05215658, for short) using data from Earth-based telescopes and Gaia satellite observations. The team shows J05215658 is being orbited by a massive unseen companion -- and they suspect it might be an entirely new class of black holes.
A noninteracting low-mass black hole–giant star binary system, Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.aau4005)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Monday November 04 2019, @08:25PM
You joke (I hope), but tiny black holes are actually one of the candidates for dark matter that haven't been completely ruled out yet.
Assuming dark matter is in fact some exotic non-interacting material though - it would be almost impossible to create a black hole out of the stuff. It just can't clump together enough to form dense objects like rocks, much less black holes. When two bits of normal matter rush towards each other, they collide, both slowing down while the excess kinetic energy is converted to heat. That's how stars and planets form - repeated collisions slow down clouds of dust and gas until they coalesce into a single object.
Dark matter can't do that - collisions are an electromagnetic interaction, and dark matter doesn't respond to electromagnetism. If it did, it wouldn't be invisible, we would at least be able to see it absorbing or scattering light that passes through it, as we can with clouds of dust or gas. Two dark matter particles rush towards each other, they're going to pass right through each other without interacting and continue on there merry way to distant parts unknown. Unless there's some other fundamental forces at work that we've never had any hint of because they only apply to dark matter - and there's precious little theoretical basis to assume that.