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    Dark Matter May Be Trapped in All the Black Holes

    by Pedro Ferreira Aug 08, 2017 5 minutes

    This isn’t the first time scientists have suggested black holes might be dark matter, but we thought the possibility had been decisively ruled out. The resurrection of the idea is but one example of the fertile creativity that follows a new discovery.Photograph by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center / Flickr

    When, on February the 11th, 2016, the spokesperson for the Advanced Laser Interferometric Gravitational Wave Observer, or aLIGO, for short, announced the discovery of gravitational waves, I was stunned. For sure, we expected aLIGO to, at some point, give us something interesting, but we thought it would be tentative. We expected that the project would, after a sophisticated and laborious look at months or years of data, show us a weak signal, popping its head feebly above the noise.  

    But no, the plots that were shown that fateful day in February were so clear and unambiguous that I didn’t take any convincing. I could

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