Saturday, October 10, 2026 · 5:00 PM – 5:45 PM
EcoTarium — 222 Harrington Way, Worcester, MA
Speaker: David Kaiser, MIT October 10, 2026 5:00 – 5:45 pm Could Tiny Black Holes from the Big Bang Solve the Mystery of Dark Matter? For fifty years, physicists have been stymied by the puzzle of dark matter. From the motion of enormous clusters of galaxies to the rate at which individual galaxies spin, decades of careful measurements have indicated that all the matter that astronomers can see contributes only a tiny fraction of all the mass in the universe. Many hypothetical new particles have been proposed, which might play the role of dark matter. Yet after decades of clever experiments, no evidence of any such particle has turned up. In recent years, many physicists have returned to a different idea: what if all of dark matter consists of ordinary matter locked up within black holes, which could have formed right after the big bang? Recent studies have clarified various ways in which such “primordial black holes” could have formed. Meanwhile, if these tiny black holes do make up the dark matter, then we may expect at least one of them to cross through the inner Solar System per decade. Such close encounters could be detected based on how they would affect the motion of…