Washington: The nature of dark matter still poses to be one of biggest mysteries in astrophysics. While one view suggests that dark matter is composed of material universe, another proposes that it is made up of black holes formed during the first second of our universe’s existence.
In a research that supports the second theory, Alexander Kashlinsky, an astrophysicist at NASA Goddard, said, “This study is an effort to bring together a broad set of ideas and observations to test how well they fit, and the fit is surprisingly good. If this is correct, then all galaxies, including our own, are embedded within a vast sphere of black holes each about 30 times the sun’s mass.”
In 2005, Kashlinsky led a team of astronomers using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to explore the background glow of infrared light in one part of the sky. The researchers reported excessive patchiness in the glow and concluded it was likely caused by the aggregate light of the first sources to illuminate the universe more than 13 billion years ago.
Follow-up studies confirmed that this cosmic infrared background (CIB) showed similar unexpected structure in other parts of the sky.
In his new paper published on May 24 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Kashlinsky analyzes what might have happened if dark matter consisted of a population of black holes similar to those detected by LIGO. (ANI)