Black holes are still one of the Universe’s greatest mysteries, distant bodies capable of gobbling up anything and everything that crosses their event horizons. However, experts now say they’re not all distant and they’re not all massive and tiny ones could float through our Solar System and cause observable effects.
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00:00Black holes are still one of our universe's greatest mysteries.
00:07Massive distant bodies capable of gobbling up anything and everything that crosses their
00:11event horizons.
00:12However, experts now say they're not all distant, and they're not all massive, and tiny ones
00:17could float through our solar system and cause observable effects.
00:21Experts say that primordial black holes, or PBHs, were formed mere moments after the Big
00:25Bang.
00:26These black holes were formed without nearly as much matter as later ones, as there simply
00:30wasn't enough stuff to collapse into a normal black hole.
00:33However, they could still do so because the conditions in the initial moments after the
00:36Big Bang were much different than today, as space as we know it was expanding and near
00:40the speed of light.
00:41Astronomers have long believed that these black holes, which are around the mass of
00:44a giant asteroid and the size of an atom, could wander around the universe.
00:49And experts have just calculated that we are likely visited by one of them around every
00:52ten years.
00:53They also found that if one of them comes within just 280 million miles of Mars, we
00:58could be able to detect that, as it would effectively cause Mars to wobble on its axis.
01:03That shift would equate to around 3.3 feet of Martian movement over ten years.
01:07But that's measurable.
01:08Experts add that as a PBH rips through our solar system at nearly 450,000 miles per hour,
01:13it could also affect the trajectories of asteroids and other cosmic objects as well.
01:23NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology