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Credit: Kavli IPMU

MICHELLE STARR 4 APR 2019

 

We still don't know what dark matter is, but we can strike a line through one option. It is not, as per a theory proposed by the brilliant Stephen Hawking, a bunch of teeny-tiny microscopic black holes.

In the most rigorous test of the theory to date, an international team led by researchers from the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (IPMU) in Japan has searched for the telltale sign of such minuscule black holes, and the result was pretty damning.

The scientists were hunting for a particular flicker of stars in a nearby galaxy - the way the light would appear to us if a black hole less than a tenth of a millimetre were passing in front of it.

 

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