Depiction of a primordial black hole forming amid a sea of hot, color-charged quarks and gluons, a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Credit: Kaća Bradonjić
In the first quintillionth of a second, the universe may have sprouted microscopic black holes with enormous amounts of nuclear charge, according to “primordial” black holes would not have been the goliaths that we detect today, but rather microscopic regions of ultradense matter that would have formed in the first quintillionth of a second following the Big Bang and then collapsed and scattered across the cosmos, tugging on surrounding space-time in ways that could explain the dark matter that we know today.
Uncovering Super-Charged Black Holes
Now, MIT physicists have found that this primordial process also would have produced some unexpected companions: even smaller black holes with unprecedented amounts of a nuclear-physics property known as “color charge.”
These smallest, “super-charged” black holes would have been an entirely new state of matter, which likely evaporated a fraction of a second after they spawned. Yet they could still have influenced a key cosmological transition: the time when the first atomic nuclei were forged. The physicists postulate that the color-charged black holes could have affected the balance of fusing nuclei, in a way that astronomers might someday detect with future measurements. Such an observation would point convincingly to primordial black holes as the root of all dark matter today.
“Even though these short-lived, exotic creatures are not around today, they could have affected cosmic history in ways that could show up in subtle signals today,” says David Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of physics at MIT. “Within the idea that all dark matter could be accounted for by black holes, this gives us new things to look for.”
Kaiser and his co-author, MIT graduate student Elba Alonso-Monsalve, have published their study on June 6 in the journal DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.231402
This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy. Alonso-Monsalve is also supported by a fellowship from the MIT Department of Physics.
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