Scientists have put the Stephen Hawking theory to its most rigorous test to date, saying dark matter is not made up of primordial black holes smaller than a tenth of a millimetre. About 85 per cent of the matter in the universe is believed to be made up of dark matter. Its gravitational force prevents stars in our Milky Way from flying apart. However, attempts to detect such dark matter particles using underground experiments, or accelerator experiments including the world’s largest accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, have failed so far, according to the study published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
This has led scientists to consider Hawking’s 1974 theory of the existence of primordial black holes, born shortly after the Big Bang, and his speculation that they could make up a large fraction of the elusive dark matter scientists are trying to discover. Researchers led by Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe in Japan used the gravitational lensing effect to look for primordial black holes between Earth and the Andromeda galaxy.
Gravitational lensing, an effect first suggested by Albert Einstein, manifests itself as the bending of light rays coming from a distant object such as a star due to the gravitational effect of an intervening massive object such as a primordial black hole. In order to maximise the chances of capturing an event, the researchers used the Hyper Suprime-Cam digital camera on the Subaru telescope in Hawaii, which can capture the whole image of the Andromeda galaxy in one shot.