AS if forecasting whether asteroids will hit the Earth wasn鈥檛 hard enough, it now seems that primordial black holes could surprise us by nudging a rock or two our way.
Some physicists think these little black holes, invisible remnants of the early universe, could be a candidate for the dark matter making up much of the universe鈥檚 mass. Alexander Shatskiy of the Lebedev Institute in Moscow, Russia, points out that if all dark matter, is black holes they would likely pass through the asteroid belts in our galactic backyard. Since a metre-sized primordial black hole can have the mass of the Earth, it would need only to pass near an asteroid to knock it out of a safe orbit and towards our planet, he says ().
鈥淚f anything comes through and disrupts those clouds, we could be in trouble,鈥� says Daniel Holz, an astrophysicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. However, Holz points out that Shatskiy鈥檚 estimates represent a worst-case scenario.
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In any case, the threat is unlikely to be immediate: Shatskiy鈥檚 calculations suggest that an impact on Earth caused by black holes passing near an asteroid would only happen every 100 million years or so.
Comets and Asteroids 鈥� Learn more about the threat to human civilisation in our .
