Massive Black Holes Whip Dark Matter Into a Frenzy

(gentle music)

[Narrator] This is dark matter.

No, not the actual dark stuff, the little gray lines,

and this is a black hole,

or at least it's a simulation of one.

See the blue region around the black hole?

That's called the ergosphere,

a spinning gravitational field so powerful,

it can suck these illusive dark matter particles

into its gyre.

What's the point?

The ergosphere it's like a gigantic particle accelerator.

See those glowing dots?

Gamma rays, which is what dark matter particles become

when they smash together

and convert their mass into energy.

Thanks Einstein!

They only show up on the left hand side

because the ergosphere spins so powerfully

it pulls the (mumbles) space time along with it.

In other words, it's theoretically impossible

for a particle to move the other way.

Let's go back to the beginning.

I never get tired of that swirling.

Even though nobody knows much about dark matter,

it is central to our understanding universe,

simply because there is so much of it.

Like 75% of the universe is dark matter.

In order to confirm these simulations

NASA would need to train telescopes on black holes

more than a million times more massive than our own sun.

But the hard part?

Telling which gamma rays come from that black hole,

and which are from the billion other gamma ray sources

in the universe.

Good luck NASA.