A new model by an international group of researchers suggests that dark matter is hidden within primordial black holes created in the first moments following the Big Bang, a press statement reveals.
The model was created by astrophysicists at Yale University, the University of Miami, and the European Space Agency (ESA). Now, they believe that data from the recently-launched James Webb Space Telescope could prove the model true in a move that would completely alter our understanding of the cosmos.
Dark matter has only been indirectly observed via enormous amounts of unaccounted-for gravitational force observed throughout the universe and phenomena such as gravitational lensing. Researchers in Italy recently believed they observed direct evidence of dark matter in the form of flashes of light in sodium iodide crystals. However, a team at Yale was unable to reproduce those results casting the original claims into doubt.
The new study by the group of international researchers, published in The Astrophysical Journal, took inspiration from a 1970 theory proposed by physicists Stephen Hawking and Bernard Carr. The two physicists argued that in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang, minuscule fluctuations might have created "lumpy" regions with extra mass as the universe rapidly expanded. According to the theory, these lumpy regions then collapsed into early primordial black holes.
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