An international team of astronomers conducted the most stringent test of the theory of the famous English theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, suggesting that the elusive dark matter may consist of primary black holes smaller than a tenth of a millimeter, born shortly after the Big Bang. The results virtually eliminated this possibility.

It is known that almost the entire mass of the Universe is enclosed in dark matter. Its gravity prevents the decay of our Milky Way and other galaxies. However, attempts to detect the particles of the mysterious invisible substance as part of experiments under the Earth’s surface or at accelerators, such as the Large Hadron Collider, have not yet borne fruit.

-authors of the study

This prompted scientists to consider an alternative theory of dark matter, proposed in 1974 by Stephen Hawking. It assumes the existence of primordial black holes, a large number of which may be hiding in the halo of our galaxy, and that they contain an invisible mass of the Universe.

Search for their team went between the Earth and the Andromeda Galaxy, about 2.5 million light-years distant from us. Calculations showed that if Stephen Hawking’s assumption is true, then watching the stars in our neighbor, the original black holes can be detected using the effect of gravitational lensing, first described by Albert Einstein and involving the deflection of a massive foreground object from the distant object . That is, astronomers planned to see the twinkling of stars, due to the distortion of their light by the primary black holes in the halo of the Milky Way.

However, it is quite difficult to catch a gravitational lensing event, since this requires the fulfillment of several conditions. In particular, the star in Andromeda, the primary black hole acting as a gravitational lens, and the telescope on the Earth must line up. Thus, to increase their chances, the researchers used the digital camera Hyper Suprime-Cam on the Subaru telescope in Hawaii, which can display the entire Andromeda galaxy in one picture.

Taking into account how fast the primary black holes are and that they will move in interstellar space, we had to get a lot of images to try to catch the twinkling of stars. If dark matter really consists of primary black holes, then we should have caught about a thousand such events.

But, after careful analysis of 190 consecutive images of the Andromeda galaxy, taken over seven hours during one clear night, the team was able to identify only one candidate for the primary black hole. Based on this, the researchers believe that the contribution of such objects to the invisible mass of the Universe is no more than 0.1 percent, therefore Stephen Hawking’s theory is hardly correct.

Stephen Hawking's theory of dark matter failed the test
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