Measuring Black Holes with Spacecraft Stopwatches ⚡ экспресс
A nearby burst from an evaporating primordial black hole (PBH) creates a curved gamma-ray front, leading to measurable deviations from the flat-wave inter-satellite delays. A purely geometric method is proposed to determine the distance to a gamma-ray burst, combining source localization from telescope data with time delays between multiple satellites. The method was applied to short gamma-ray bursts localized by the Swift observatory; in the current sample, no significant deviations from a flat wave were found, with the most constraining event giving a lower distance limit of 1.2 AU, already probing solar-system scales. The analysis shows that direct distance measurements are achievable up to 10^3 AU using current and near-future technology. After measuring the finite distance to the source, the mass and lifetime of the PBH can be directly inferred. Future wide-field localization systems and deep-space gamma-ray detectors with long baselines could extend the search to 10^5 AU and beyond.
A pebble dropped in a pond creates curved ripples, but from far away they appear as straight lines. Gamma-ray flashes from an evaporating black hole behave the same: a distant burst sends flat waves, while a nearby one arrives curved.
Astronomers use this curvature to measure distance. By comparing the tiny time lags between satellites (because the speed of light is constant), they can pinpoint the source. This technique, using light measurement (photometry), has been checked with NASA's Swift satellite. No curved signals appeared within 1.2 AU — the Earth-Sun gap. But future deep-space probes could search farther. The prey are primordial black holes: relics from the Big Bang, smaller than an atom yet heavier than a skyscraper. If one evaporates, it would emit a Hawking radiation burst we could catch.
🎯 Primordial black holes, if they exist, are tiny but incredibly dense — remnants from the Big Bang — and they could be evaporating today, flashing gamma rays detectable by deep-space probes.