Can Black Holes Explain Dark Matter? New Study Helps Disprove the Idea

D-brief
By Chelsea Gohd
Oct 11, 2018 2:51 PMMay 17, 2019 9:06 PM
black hole
A new study casts doubt on the long lingering idea that black holes might explain dark matter. (Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)

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The hunt for a dark matter explanation seems endless, but now we can mostly rule out one often mentioned potential culprit: black holes.

“The idea of primordial black holes as dark matter is quite old, with some papers already in the ’70s when Stephen Hawking and others proposed it,” said lead study author Miguel Zumalacárregui of the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics. Scientists couldn’t find any proof for the idea in the ’90s, and it started to fade away as an explanation. But the 2015 detection of gravitational waves re-ignited consideration for black holes as an explanation for dark matter.

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