Black Holes and Dark Revelations: Gravitational Waves Provide New Clues to the Composition of Dark Matter

Artist’s impression of a microlensing event caused by a black hole observed from Earth toward the Large Magellanic Cloud. The light of a background star located in the LMC is bent by a putative primordial black hole in the Galactic halo and magnified when observed from the Earth. Microlensing causes very characteristic variation of brightness of the background star, enabling the determination of the lens’s mass and distance. Credit: J. Skowron / OGLE.

“Explaining why these two populations of black holes are so different is one of the biggest mysteries of modern astronomy,” says Dr. Mróz. Artist’s impression of the Large Magellanic Cloud being lensed by massive objects in the Milky Way halo. Credit: J. Skowron / OGLEFortunately, this hypothesis can be verified with astronomical observations. We observe that copious amounts of dark matter exist in the Milky Way. If it were composed of black holes, we should be able to detect them in our cosmic neighborhood.

The idea of using gravitational microlensing to study dark matter is not new. It was first proposed in the 1980s by the famous Polish astrophysicist Bohdan Paczyński. His idea inspired the start of three major experiments: Polish OGLE, American MACHO, and French EROS. The first results from these experiments demonstrated that black holes less massive than one solar mass may comprise less than 10 percent of dark matter.

Source: Tech Daily Report (techdailyreport.net)

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