This post causes me to wonder if anyone has speculated on the difference our intrepid little space probe would find if it flew into a black hole made of dark matter matter rather than a black hole made of "normal" matter? I would think that they would be exactly the same because a black hole is an effect of gravity and not the matter that created it - but i dont know, you tell me!
As we don't really know what dark matter is, there's no way of saying for sure. If Dark Matter is composed of a field that can have negative energies, then it might never collapse. However your question illustrates one way of determining the spatial density of dark matter, by answering the question: just how quickly do neutron stars turn into black holes via accretion of Dark Matter? By studying that question quite rigorous constraints on dark matter can be set. There's several papers on that very point in the journals.
This post causes me to wonder if anyone has speculated on the difference our intrepid little space probe would find if it flew into a black hole made of dark matter matter rather than a black hole made of "normal" matter? I would think that they would be exactly the same because a black hole is an effect of gravity and not the matter that created it - but i dont know, you tell me!
The topic shifted. The thread started off discussing dark matter clumps and then people pointed out that doing a near flyby of a blackhole would be just as or more effective, and less speculative.
It is still speculative in that all the ideas (from memory) involve a fortuitous distribution of the missing mass that happens to create a sort of interstellar gateway. There is no argument that the mass is likely to be found in this form. The only requirement is that it not be ruled out by what we already know and can observe.