Could Evidence of Primordial Black Holes Be Hiding in Plain Sight?

'Are Primordial Black Holes real...?' asks Universe Today. 'If they do exist, a 'new paper suggests they may be hiding in places so unlikely that nobody ever thought to look there...' — in planets, in asteroids, and here on earth.

Physicists hypothesize that Primordial Black Holes (PBHs) formed in the early Universe from extremely dense pockets of sub-atomic matter that collapsed directly into black holes. They could form part or all of what we call dark matter. However, they remain hypothetical because none have been observed... The authors claim that evidence for PBHs could be found in objects as large as hollowed out planetoids or asteroids and objects as small as rocks here on Earth. 'Small primordial black holes could be captured by rocky planets or asteroids, consume their liquid cores from inside and leave hollow structures,' the authors write. 'Alternatively, a fast black hole can leave a narrow tunnel in a solid object while passing through it.'

'We could look for such micro-tunnels here on Earth in very old rocks,' the authors claim, explaining that the search wouldn't involve specialized, expensive equipment... 'The chances of finding these signatures are small, but searching for them would not require much resources and the potential payoff, the first evidence of a primordial black hole, would be immense,' said Dejan Stojkovic [the paper's co-author from the State University of New York]. 'We have to think outside of the box because what has been done to find primordial black holes previously hasn't worked....' Cosmology is kind of at a standstill while we wrestle with the idea of dark matter. Could PBHs be dark matter? Could they behave like the authors suggest, and be detected in this manner?

'The smartest people on the planet have been working on these problems for 80 years and have not solved them yet,' Stojkovic said. 'We don't need a straightforward extension of the existing models. We probably need a completely new framework altogether.'

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