Cool use of old tech to test modern theories. When Voyager I was launched, dark matter wasn't even a thing - much less dark matter made of tiny black holes.
Tiny black holes weighing 10 billion metric tons should be hot enough to radiate electrons and positrons. Earth-bound detectors would not be able to spot those low-energy particles, as they would be deflected by the sun’s magnetic field. But Voyager 1 should be able to spot them from its position outside the sun’s magnetic bubble, the heliosphere.
In fact, since it exited the heliosphere in 2012, Voyager 1 has measured a small, consistent flux of positrons and electrons. But even if they all come from tiny black holes, there wouldn’t be enough black holes to account for more than 1% of the Milky Way’s dark matter, Boudaud and Cirelli calculate. Cummings says the energy spectrum of the particles suggests they all come from more mundane sources such as the remnants of supernova explosions.
Kudos on the legitimate description of exploding stars as "mundane".
https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.03075
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/aging-voyager-1-spacecraft-undermines-idea-dark-matter-tiny-black-holes
Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby
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Neat indeed.
ReplyDeleteMundane supernovae for EVERYBODY!
The dog didn't bark...
ReplyDeleteInteresting elimination!
Mundane is the correct usage, also for cosmic :
ReplyDeletehttp://en.antiquitatem.com/cosmos-mundus-world-scientific-language
en.antiquitatem.com - Mundus (World) / cosmos: the creation of a new scientific language in Latin