Robert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K. whose articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space, Newsweek and ZME Science. He also writes about science communication for Elsevier and the European Journal of Physics. Rob holds a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy from the U.K.
An artist's impression of a gravitational lensing event of background LMC stars indicating the presence of a black hole
Gravitational wave observations of mergers between stellar-mass black holes indicate a more distant population of black holes with much more mass, equivalent to between 20 and 100 suns."Explaining why these two populations of black holes are so different is one of the biggest mysteries of modern astronomy," Mróz pointed out.
Dark matter is estimated to comprise 90% to 95% of the Milky Way's mass. That means, if dark matter is made of primordial black holes, our galaxy should contain many of these ancient bodies. Black holes don't emit light because they are bound by a light-trapping surface called an"event horizon." That means we can't"see" says objects of mass warp the very fabric of space and time, united as a single entity called"spacetime.
"Microlensing occurs when three objects — an observer on Earth, a source of light, and a lens — virtually ideally align in space," OGLE survey Principle Investigator Andrzej Udalski, said in the statement."During a microlensing event, the source’s light may be deflected and magnified, and we observe a temporary brightening of the source’s light."
Thus, because more massive black holes would cause longer events, these experiments weren't sensitive to that population of black holes either. The studied data, described as"the longest, largest, and most accurate photometric observations of stars in the LMC in the history of" by Udalski, was collected by the OGLE project from 2001 to 2020 during its third and fourth operating phases. The team compared the microlensing events seen by OGLE to the theoretically predicted amount of such events, assuming that the Milky Way's dark matter is made up of primordial black holes.
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