[ad_1]
A Pune-based couple on an international team demystified a popular theory – proposed by none other than Stephen Hawking five decades ago – about the mysterious "dark matter."
The astrophysics duo Surhud More and Anupreeta More of the Interuniversity Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) collaborated with American and Japanese scientists to challenge Hawking's famous theory that Black holes formed very early in the universe could have formed. black matter.
Dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter, believed to be responsible for 85% of the mass of the universe. However, this remains hypothetical because all attempts to detect dark matter particles by experiments have failed so far.
For their experiments, researchers at IUCAA, Tokyo University, Princeton University, and Osaka University examined Andromeda, a spiral galaxy that is the nearest neighbor to the Milky Way with the Subaru telescope in Hawaii four years ago.
They used a technique called gravitational lens to search for primordial black holes – with a mass window of 0.001 to 10 times the mass of the moon – in the space between the Milky Way and Andromeda.
If Hawking's theory was correct, the team should have discovered nearly 1,000 observations compatible with primordial black holes. But after a seven-hour search with one of the best telescopes in the world, they found only one such candidate.
Back in 1971, Hawking showed that primordial black holes – made up of ordinary matter and formed within seconds of the Big Bang – could be a strong choice as candidates for dark matter.
These primordial black holes differ markedly from the black holes resulting from the death of a giant star.
Primal black holes can have a wide range of masses, ranging from one billionth of a gram to thousands of times that of solar mass.
Now, the whole theory is involved after recent discoveries.
"Our research has shown that primordial black holes can not be candidates for dark matter. Theorists must find another theory, "said Surhud. DH. The results were published in the journal Nature Astronomy on Monday.
"The study refutes (or calls into question) Hawking's hypothesis about the first black holes in the universe. The results have now confirmed that primordial black holes with masses similar to or less massive than the moon can not contribute to more than one percent of all dark matter, "said Surhud.
[ad_2]
Source link