New study constrains asteroid-mass black holes as dark matter candidates

Since the earliest moments after the Big Bang, the universe has harbored a question it refuses to answer plainly: what is the invisible mass holding everything together? For decades, primordial black holes — born not from dying stars but from the cosmos's own violent infancy — have stood as a compelling candidate. Now, researchers from Oakland and Rice Universities have applied careful modeling to asteroid-mass variants of these objects, and the universe has offered a sobering reply: these particular black holes almost certainly cannot account for the dark matter we observe, though the questio