Tiny black holes explain galaxy flows and the expansion of the Universe express

Original: "More power on large scales"
· Jeremy Mould
arXiv:2601.07106 · 2026-01-12 · CC BY 4.0 · 1 min
Tiny black holes born at the Universe's dawn could explain why galaxies move faster and smooth out disagreements in expansion measurements.

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Dark matter may not be particles but black holes from the Big Bang era. In the early Universe, which was like a swirling batter, they were like heavy lumps — barely moving, they gathered surrounding matter and spun it into the swift galaxy flows astronomers observe today. But there's a twist: the lightest holes, according to Hawking's theory, evaporate, emitting energy. This evaporation gently warms the cosmic 'batter' in its early stages, thereby changing the calculated rate of the Universe's expansion and smoothing out the notorious tension between different measurement methods.

Astonishingly: a hole with the mass of an asteroid compressed to a point smaller than an atomic nucleus. Its slow evaporation could produce a mysterious glow in space.
Simulations showed: accounting for such holes removes the need to tweak other cosmological parameters, an elegant strike on two mysteries at once.

One such hole weighs as much as an asteroid but is compressed to a point smaller than an atomic nucleus. Its evaporation is so unhurried that over the entire history of the Universe, it would lose only a minuscule fraction of its mass.

Scientists
Stephen HawkingJacob BekensteinVera RubinFritz ZwickyKarl SchwarzschildSubrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
Concepts
dark matter subhalo early dark energy early universe black holes black hole memory burden radiation dominated era ecdm model lcdm model neutron star mass limit mass ratio cosmological parameters matter density critical collapse primordial gravitational waves primordial magnetic fields no-hair theorem density profile negative energy metal poor reheating cosmic microwave background measurement