Dark matter might actually be tiny black holes that settle inside stars and slowly eat them from the inside out.
arXiv · March 18, 2026 · 2603.15764
The Takeaway
If gravity behaves differently at tiny scales, black holes the size of a grain of sand could be stable enough to last for billions of years. These 'micro' black holes would account for dark matter and could be discovered by observing them sink into and consume the dense cores of distant pulsars.
From the abstract
Primordial micro black holes can constitute dark matter if short-distance gravity is modified by extra dimensions or a large number of species and if the memory-burden effect sufficiently suppresses Hawking evaporation. The resulting black holes in the transition regime differ from their four-dimensional Einsteinian counterparts through their mass--radius relation, temperature, entropy, and lifetime, which can render even very light objects cosmologically stable. The most promising observational