Could dark matter consist of primordial black holes, as numerous as the stars? It’s an old, improbable idea, but it made a Lazarus-like comeback a year ago, when the discovery of gravitational waves suggested that the cosmos abounds with unexpectedly heavy black holes.
With decades-long searches failing to find the hypothetical dark matter particles that theorists have favored, physicists are turning to more radical ways of explaining the universe’s missing mass. “It’s a nutty idea,” says Marc Kamionkowski, a theorist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, whose team made the case for black hole dark matter here last week at a meeting of the American Physical Society.
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