Researchers have suggested using the high-energy collisions that occur within supermassive black holes to find more powerful and cost-effective alternatives to proposed multi-billion-dollar supercolliders.
The scientists from Johns Hopkins University believe that using supermassive black holes to search for dark matter, electron neutrinos, and other elusive particles could complement the work of conventional supercolliders and dramatically reduce the cost of future projects by letting nature do the job for them.
“One of the great hopes for particle colliders like the Large Hadron Collider is that it will generate dark matter particles, but we haven’t seen any evidence yet,” said study co-author Joseph Silk, an astrophysics professor at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Oxford, UK. “That’s why there are discussions underway to build a much more powerful version, a next-generation supercollider. But as we invest $30 billion and wait 40 years to build this supercollider, nature may provide a glimpse of the future in supermassive black holes.”
Supermassive Black Holes Might Be Nature’s Supercolliders
Designed to explore the limits of reality, supercolliders like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which boasts the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of the elusive Higgs boson and recently transmuted lead into gold, are among the most expensive projects in human history. The 17-mile-long circular LHC cost well over $8 billion alone to build, and some projections for future projects exceed those totals.
Still, supercolliders have proven a valuable and often irreplaceable tool for exploring previously untestable physics theories. In more practical terms, their discoveries have helped transform high-performance computing, the internet, and even cancer treatments.
Since these achievements and potential future achievements mean scientists will still need a way to study particles as they smash together at near light speeds, Silk and colleagues, including Dr. Andrew Mummery, a theoretical physicist at the University of Oxford, wondered if nature could provide a more economical solution. This investigation led the research team to the supermassive black hole, one of the cosmos’s most potent and enigmatic structures.
Supermassive black holes often inhabit the center of a galaxy, where they are typically more massive and spin faster than most black holes. In some cases, astronomers have witnessed black holes releasing enormous bursts of high-energy plasma. The scientists wondered if such events might generate similar high-energy collisions as a supercollider that researchers could observe and measure without building an entire facility. Such events would likely attain even higher energies than human-made colliders.
“If supermassive black holes can generate these particles by high-energy proton collisions, then we might get a signal on Earth, some really high-energy particle passing rapidly through our detectors,” Silk explained. “That would be the evidence for a novel particle collider within the most mysterious objects in the universe, attaining energies that would be unattainable in any terrestrial accelerator.”
Measuring Particles Accelerated to Unprecedentedly High Energies
In the published study, the researchers detailed the mechanics of a supermassive black hole that could support or even replace a supercollider. For example, they point out how plunging “gas flows” in the vicinity of a black hole can capture some of the energy from its spin. In more extreme cases, these gases can become “much more violent” than previously believed, adding energy to the gas particles until they “chaotically collide.”
“Some particles from these collisions go down the throat of the black hole and disappear forever,” Silk explained. “But because of their energy and momentum, some also come out, and it’s those that come out which are accelerated to unprecedentedly high energies.”
The researcher notes that although the process is not identical to the one employed by physicists operating supercolliders, the results could offer the same valuable information.
“We figured out how energetic these beams of particles could be: as powerful as you get from a supercollider, or more,” Silk said. “It’s very hard to say what the limit is, but they certainly are up to the energy of the newest supercollider that we plan to build, so they could definitely give us complementary results.”
Evidence of Dark Matter
In the study’s conclusion, Silk, Mummery, and colleagues suggest which current tools and platforms could gather supercollider-style data from supermassive black holes. For example, satellites and ground-based observatories like the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole or the Kilometer Cube Neutrino Telescope, which are already tracking supernovae, black hole eruptions, and other high-energy cosmic events, would be up for the job. Although they would no longer look for the Higgs boson, they may collect evidence that solves another longstanding physics mystery.
“We’d see something with a strange signature that conceivably provides evidence for dark matter, which is a bit more of a leap, but it’s possible,” Silk said.
While the new approach suggests several possible benefits to using collisions in and around supermassive black holes to complement the data obtained by costly supercolliders, Silk notes that the cosmic distances between Earth and the other galaxies that house these phenomena are a potential limitation. However, the researcher also notes that even though these supermassive black holes are “far away,” the particles they eject will get to us.”
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.