Are black holes hiding inside planets like Earth? Here's what scientists suggest

In a stunning study, astronomers have found that smallprimordial black holes(PBHs) are likely lurking inside the moons, asteroids or even planets like Earth.

According to the scientists, these hypotheticalblack holes were created soon after the Big Bang and resulted from pockets of subatomic matter that were so dense that they faced gravitational collapse.

Presently, scientists consider PBHs as dark matter. It is a likely source of primordial gravitational waves.

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According to recent research, small PBHs are likely present in the interiors of main-sequence neutron and dwarf stars and are slowly consuming their gas supply.

Also Read:A 'primordial' black hole will pass through our solar system every 10 years. Will it harm?

A team of physicists, in a recent study, proposed the idea to include a new avenue for finding PBHs.

Here's how scientists are trying to find PBHs

The team planned to find them inside planets and asteroids by using large plates or slabs of metal for detecting PBHs for signs of their passage.

Scientists are finding the microchannels that these bodies would leave so that they areable to find the existence of PBHs.

The research was carried out by De-Chang Dai, a physicist at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan and theCenter for Education and Research in Cosmology and Astrophysics (CERCA) at Case Western Reserve University, as well as Dejan Stojkovic, who is a physicist from the High Energy Physics and Cosmologygroup at the State University of New York, Buffalo.

In the paper, the findings were detailed and it is to be published in the journalPhysics of the Dark Universe after the review.

For decades, scientists have been on a hunt for the PBHs since their existence was found by Russian scientistsIgor D. Novikov and Yakov Zeldovich in 1966.

Also Read:Earth's mantle is hosting strange 'black holes' with mysterious waves. Here's what they are

Speaking to Universe Today about why they proposed novel detection methods for PBHs through email, De-Chang and Stojkovic said, "If anasteroid, or a moon, or a small planet (planetoid) has a liquid core surrounded by a solid crust, then a small PBH will consume the dense liquid core relatively quickly (within weeks to months). The crust will remain intact if the material is strong enough to support gravitational stress."

"Thus, we will end up with a hollow structure. If the centralblack holeis ejected (due to collisions with other objects), the density will be lower than the usual density of a rocky object with a liquid core," they added.

"We found, for example, that granite can support hollow structures up to the radius of 1/10 of the Earth's radius. That is why we should concentrate on planetoids, moons, or asteroids," said Stojkovic.

(With inputs from agencies)