Tiny Black Holes Could Be Eating Stars From Their Cores Like Parasites [Study]

Dark matter could lurk inside the stars and slowly consume them until they become massive black holes.

Parasite Black Holes Inside the Stars

A new study led by astrophysicist Earl Bellinger of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics and Yale University suggests that Sun-like stars may have absorbed microscopic black holes that originated at the beginning of time, which have since been sitting at their cores and slowly slurping up material to create new black holes. It examines the effects of parasitism on stars and how to recognize them if we come across them.

There are countless black holes in the universe, varying in size. We have observed black holes with stellar mass ranges most likely created by dying giant stars' mergers and core collapse. Every galaxy contains supermassive monsters that range in mass from millions to billions of times that of the Sun. There are also elusive but increasingly frequent black holes with masses in between.

The minuscule black holes that have masses comparable to planets, moons, or asteroids are what we haven't discovered. These objects lack the mass and gravitational force necessary to collapse into a dense mass comparable to a black hole.

However, hypothetically, there is a scenario in which miniature black holes may have formed. Scientists had suggested that tiny black holes could have formed in the first seconds following the Big Bang when the universe's matter was still sufficiently hot and dense to allow for the collapse of extra-density patches into unavoidable regions of spacetime. Stephen Hawking proposed this theory in the 1970s, and has since been expanded by other scientists.

Though their disappearance is unknown, the "primordial" black holes could provide a neat explanation for the excess gravity in the universe that dark matter is thought to be responsible for. According to some experts, they might have ended up inside neutron stars, sitting in the cores and simply chowing on like some strange cosmic parasite.

Bellinger and his colleagues estimated for their research what would happen to a star that formed around a primordial black hole with a mass between 0.8 and 100 solar masses. Additionally, they carried out the first comprehensive numerical evolutionary simulations of stars similar to the hidden primordial black holes in their cores.

The researchers discovered that the tiniest black holes will struggle to expand. The black hole would take billions of years to devour the stable.

However, a dwarf planet-mass black hole would have an even greater appetite. It would begin to devour the core of a stratifying Sun, causing the material swirling around it to form a disk that emits enormous amounts of light and heat.

The star would be fuelled by the accretion disk swirling around the black hole within a billion years rather than fusion. Ironically, the black hole would be the source of the star's light. Researchers have given this speculative star type the moniker Hawking star.

Dark Matter and Black Holes

Black holes and dark matter are closely related. The reversal of Maxwell's laws causes the darkness of both. This inversion is brought about close to the black hole's horizon by magnetic currents that reverse Maxwell's laws when combined with extreme heat, pressure, and phase transition.

This indicates that a magnetic charge replaces the electric charge and that the magnetic current represses the electric current. One could say that a magnetoelectric force is generated in the black hole's interior. Black holes are the source of dark matter.

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