New fear unlocked: spontaneous black hole implosion.
Fresh research predicts that planets may be able to accumulate enough dark matter to suddenly form a black hole at their core. As the intruder grows, catastrophe unfolds: it would then devour the world from the inside out, becoming a black hole with the same mass as its unfortunate meal.
The findings, published as a study in the journal Physical Review D, are terrifying to contemplate. The intent, however, wasn't to haunt our dreams but to demonstrate a potential new avenue for studying dark matter, the invisible substance that accounts for 85 percent of all mass in the universe. Oh, and this would only affect gas planets, so the Earth is safe for now.
"In gaseous exoplanets of various sizes, temperatures, and densities, black holes could form on observable timescales, potentially even generating multiple black holes in a single exoplanet's lifetime," co-lead author Mehrdad Phoroutan-Mehr, an astronomer at the University of California, Riverside, said in a statement about the work.
"These results show how exoplanet surveys could be used to hunt for superheavy dark matter particles, especially in regions hypothesized to be rich in dark matter like our Milky Way's galactic center."
Astronomers still don't know what dark matter actually is. We know it exists because of its gravity, which governs the formation of the largest structures in the cosmos. Beyond that, it's a veritable apparition.
The prevailing model suggests that dark matter is made up of weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs, which are heavy and slow enough that they clump together and form enormous dark matter "halos" that give birth to entire galaxies. WIMPs also don't interact with ordinary matter and even light, rendering them effectively invisible. It's hypothesized that these particles can annihilate each other upon colliding, releasing gamma rays that should be detectable, but so far, efforts to detect signs of these collisions have come up short.
In the study, the researchers go down a different route and propose that dark matter particles are heavy but don't annihilate. Near the center of the galaxy, where dark matter concentrations are the highest, that means that a massive gas giant like Jupiter could capture some of these dark matter particles in its core. There, rare interactions between the dark matter and ordinary matter could result in the dark matter particles losing their speed, clumping together, and becoming dense enough to spawn a black hole. This could happen in as little as ten months, they found.
Surprisingly, this may not necessarily spell doom for whatever world is unlucky enough to find itself incubating a cosmic monster.
"Whether a black hole inside a planet survives or not depends on how massive it is when it first forms," Phoroutan-Mehr told Physics World. If it starts off small enough, it may wink out before it has a chance to feed and grow.
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