New Delhi, India

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Scientists have suggested that a tiny black hole is likely to pass through our solar system after every decade and this can be spotted by observing the wobbling of Mars.

This observation was on the basis of the idea that the majority of dark matter in the universe is filled with minuscule black holes.

The researchers, in order to determine the truth of this theory, have been closely observing the orbit of Mars.

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According to a new paper published in the journal Physical Review D, the tiny black holes when travelling through the solar system can make the red planet wobble in a way that it can be spotted from Earth.

"Given decades of precision telemetry, scientists know the distance between Earth and Mars to an accuracy of about 10 centimetres [4 inches]," said study co-author David Kaiser, professor of physics at MIT, in a statement.

"We're taking advantage of this highly instrumented region of space to try and look for a small effect. If we see it, that would count as a real reason to keep pursuing this delightful idea that all of dark matter consists of black holes that were spawned in less than a second after the Big Bang and have been streaming around the universe for 14 billion years," he added.

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Also Read: Mega collision with another galaxy 9 billion years ago created Milky Way black hole

The researchers in the paper estimated one of these tiny black holes is likely to fly through our solar system one time in every decade.

"Primordial black holes do not live in the solar system. Rather, they're streaming through the universe, doing their own thing," said paper co-author Sarah Geller, who is now a postdoc at the University of California at Santa Cruz, in the statement.

"And the probability is, they're going through the inner solar system at some angle once every 10 years or so," he added.

How do scientists plan to detect the passing of black holes?

To detect these black holes, researchers have modelled every large body's orbits in the solar system and discovered that the tiny wobbles in the orbit of Mars can give a hint of the passing of asteroid-mass black holes.

"State-of-the-art simulations of the solar system include more than a million objects, each of which has a tiny residual effect," said study co-author, Benjamin Lehmann, who is a researcher at MIT, in the statement.

Watch: Astronomers find a rare black hole that defies current theories

"But even modelling two dozen objects in a careful simulation, we could see there was a real effect that we could dig into," he added.

Such wobbles will be detected by equipment on Earth.

"We need as much clarity as we can of the expected backgrounds, such as the typical speeds and distributions of boring space rocks, versus these primordial black holes," said Kaiser.

"Luckily for us, astronomers have been tracking ordinary space rocks for decades as they have flown through our solar system, so we could calculate typical properties of their trajectories and begin to compare them with the very different types of paths and speeds that primordial black holes should follow," he added.

(With inputs from agencies)