Dark matter could be accumulating inside planets close to the galactic centre, potentially even forming black holes that might consume the afflicted planets from the inside-out, new research has predicted.
According to the standard model of cosmology, all galaxies including the Milky Way sit inside huge haloes of dark matter, with the greatest density at the centre. This dark matter primarily interacts only through gravity, although some popular models such as weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPS) do imply that dark-matter particles may occasionally scatter off normal matter.
This has led PhD student Mehrdad Phoroutan Mehr and Tara Fetherolf of the University of California, Riverside, to make an extraordinary proposal: that dark matter could elastically scatter off molecules inside planets, lose energy and become trapped inside those planets, and then grow so dense that they collapse to form a black hole. In some cases, a black hole could be produced in just ten months, according to Mehr and Fetherolf’s calculations, reported in Physical Review D.
Even more remarkable is that while many planets would be consumed by their parasitic black hole, it is feasible that some planets could actually survive with a black hole inside them, while in others the black hole might evaporate, Mehr tells Physics World.
“Whether a black hole inside a planet survives or not depends on how massive it is when it first forms,” he says.
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