Dark Dimensions and Ancient Black Holes: Unraveling the Mysteries of Dark Matter

0:00Stuart Gary This is space Time Series 29, episode

0:02 122 for broadcast on 12 October 2026. Coming up on Space Time. How ancient black holes and the hidden fifth dimension could explain dark matter, Australia's new lunar rover revealed, and evidence of activity coming from the Milky Way's supermassive black hole. All that and more coming up on, um, space Time. Welcome to Space Time with Stuart G.

0:46 The new study claims an ancient hypothetical type of black hole and a hidden fifth dimension of space time may help explain both the mysterious substance known as dark matter, uh, and a strange type of ultra high energy neutrino detective detected three years ago. The research reported in the journal Physical Review D is trying to connect real detector observations with long standing hypotheses about an extra dimension, a so called dark dimension. In the process pointing towards new ideas about where future research could go. The study's authors from Lehman College suggest that the key to this work are theoretical objects called primordial black holes, which are thought to have existed during the earliest epoch of the

1:28 cosmos, just after the big bang, 13.8 billion years years ago. Unlike the massive black holes formed from collapsing stars and galaxy sized clouds of gas, these primordial black holes would have been less than a micron wide and small enough to extend into a hypothetical extra dimension. Our, uh, current understanding of the universe tells us there are four classical dimensions, one temporal dimension of time and three spatial dimensions of length, width and depth. A fifth, seemingly hidden spatial dimension has long been hypothesised and tantalising clues about its existence do keep popping up. This dark fifth dimension is just a micron wide and hidden from our everyday view. Uh, the idea of extra dimensions aren't new. They're

2:15 needed, for example, to make string theory work. String theory explains the universe at its most fundamental level. It suggests that elemental subatomic particles like quarks, neutrinos, electrons and physical photons are actually made up of strings of energy vibrating at different frequencies. And the frequency of that vibration gives that elemental particle its properties. Different vibrational frequencies meet different subatomic particles. High energy particle collisions on the Large Hadron Collider at cern, um, the European Centre for Nuclear Research may already have opened the door to this new reality of a fifth dimension. That's because there have been persistent anomalies in some of the LHC

2:56 data. You see, the amount of energy going into an event must be equal to the amount of energy coming out. But experiments of the LHC have consistently found measurable quantities of energy appearing to simply disappear. And that raises the question of whether this energy is escaping into hidden dimensions. It could also explain why gravity is so weak. It is the weakest of the four fundamental forces of nature, assuming, of course, it is a force and not simply an effect. And if gravity is leaking into additional dimensions beyond the standard model, what's leaking into our four dimensional universe? Now, according to this new paper, those primordial black holes which we talked about at the start of

3:37 our story, could have survived for billions of years by slowly evaporating and releasing low energy particles, including sterile neutrinos, that are slipping undetected into this fifth dimension. Neutrinos are nearly massless subatomic particles that only interact very weakly with normal matter. In fact, in fact, there are billions of them passing through you right now, and you don't even notice them. As these primordial black holes contract and heat up at the end of their lives, sterile neutrinos may be transforming into active neutrinos energetic enough to be detected on Earth.

4:10 And, uh, it's this process which could explain that rare high energy neutrino event observed back in February 2023. The study's authors described their work as a single key that could unlock several different doors linking dark matter, extra dimensions, and quantum gravity. So they tested how primordial black holes would function both as standard four dimensional entities and as five dimensional ones.

4:35 And their findings suggested a rather strange picture. It turns out some primordial black holes would start out acting like standard four dimensional objects, but then they'd become unstable and transform into five dimensional ones. Others formed directly out of cosmic strings would start out in five dimensions from birth. Uh, furthermore, the extra dimension changes how long a primordial black hole would survive.

5:00 And those formed from cosmic strings in a five dimensional universe would have lifetimes comparable with the age of the universe itself. Importantly for this study to work, the hypothesis they're proposing is testable. Future neutrino detectors could either support or challenge the idea. And next year, a new detector project will launch on a high altitude balloon, which will help gather more data in order to explore some of these possibilities. And needless to say, we'll keep you informed. This is space time. Still to come, Australia's new lunar rover revealed. And finally, evidence of activity from our Milky Way's supermassive black hole. All that and more still to come on, uh, space time.

5:57 The Australian space agency Acer has formally unveiled its latest version of its new Ruva Lunarova, which will travel to the moon in 2030 aboard an Intuitive Machines lander. As part of NASA's Artemis programme, the locally designed and built suitcase sized autonomous four wheel vehicle has already undergone extensive testing and is now learning to navigate a simulation of the harsh lunar south polar environment at the Queensland University of Technology's Lunar Test facility. The 20 kilogramme robotic rover will spend 14 Earth days, the equivalent of half a lunar day travelling across the barren grey lunar landscape Described by Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin as magnificent desolation when he set

6:38 foot on the moon on July 20, 1969. The rover will need to operate at temperatures ranging from over 150 degrees Celsius down to below minus 200 degrees. Some 20 Australian organisations have jointly worked on the project, which will include NASA integrated payloads to examine and analyse the lunar regolith, which ranges from rocks and pebbles down to tiny grains and dust, uh, as fine as talcum powder. One of the key ingredients scientists are looking for on the lunar surface is water. We know it's there, frozen as ice in cold traps and once mined, it could be used for drinking or for splitting into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket fuel, or in the case of oxygen, simply for breathing. But astrophysicist Professor

7:23 Richard Dejeris from Macquarie University says the problem is getting to it. He says China may have come up with one solution. A spacecraft that quite literally hops.

7:33Alex Zaharov-Reutt Water has been detected on the moon, but a

7:35 lot of it is in small icicles that are in some of the darkest and most difficult to reach places on the moon. And that means in places deep inside of craters where sunlight never comes, never shines. And to get there you have to cross terrain that's very rough and uh, you know, most common rovers that are being sent to the moon by various space faring nations wouldn't make it there. And so how do you get there? Right, if you want to first of all check how much water there is, how deep it is, whether it might eventually be usable for exploitation, you need to characterise it. And so this, this China seven mission that China was meant to launch a few months ago now had implemented a hopper as well. So that would be like a small flying

8:14 object that would jump across large areas and so it didn't have to drive across it in the form of a rover. And that way, uh, it would be able to characterise the ice that might be present in those de. Now obviously it's in dark areas, so it would need its own power source. And since the moon is, you know, 386,000 kilometres away from Earth, there is no instant communication. So it had to be pretty Much self driving, autonomous.

8:37Stuart Gary So it's more than just a case of looking on

8:39 the ground and picking up the hydroxyls and silicon.

8:42Alex Zaharov-Reutt Well, that's right, yes. No, no, the water

8:44 that has been found, uh, mostly from, from space. Right. Remote sensing, that is deep inside of dark craters.

8:50Stuart Gary The Chang' e 7 mission was supposed to launch

8:53 a couple of months ago. It didn't. They said it was because of a cyc. But surely it doesn't take that much time to defuel and then refuel a uh, rocket and lunar lander. Is there something more to it? Is it a question of the actual way you get to the lunar South Pole that makes it difficult?

9:09Alex Zaharov-Reutt Yes, there are some aspects of that. We

9:10 haven't actually been told formally why the mission was delayed. It seems that it may be a combination of a weather delay because of the typhoon, typhoon Nara and mission constraints, including the elimination of the landing site down on the lunar south pole. The idea is that the likely mission sequence was that it was going to be launched in August of this year, enter lunar orbit and spend about three months mapping the candidate region where they hoped to land, use those observations to refine the landing site and provide images for navigation of the terrain during descent, and then land in November. And the reason for November is something that we gleaned from a research paper published in 2025 that confirms that

9:49 the lunar south pole has favourable illumination only around November. Now if you need three months of reconnaissance before landing in November, then you need to launch in August and you can't simply launch the next month because then you don't have your months of reconnaissance. Um, the analysis that they needed to do combined things like illumination, thermal conditions, slopes of the area where they would be landing, communication, visibility and all that near the landing site near the Shackleton Crater.

10:13 And so unless the Chinese can do this more quickly, let's say in two months they will have the same problem next year. Right. Because the elimination window again will be roughly in November 2027. That same landing sequence would imply that they have to launch in August 2027, which is key. Typhoon season again. So we'll have to see if this works. I hope it will work, but otherwise they may have to think of a different way of approaching that whole landing sequence.

10:37Stuart Gary So it's the illumination that's the issue,

10:39 not the ability to move from one orbit to another once you're circling the moon.

10:44Alex Zaharov-Reutt M that's correct, because they plan to

10:46 land as close as possible to the lunar south pole. And that means that the sun is only ever a Few degrees above the horizon there. Right. And so most of the time it'll be dark. And so that's why there's only a small window when they can actually land and the illumination is sufficient for operations, but also to see things while they descend.

11:03Stuart Gary United States, of course, together with the

11:04 Artemis Accords, are looking at a huge project which will see the establishment of a base on the Moon. That's going to be a problem for the Artemis programme too, back then, isn't it?

11:13Alex Zaharov-Reutt That's absolutely correct, yes. The Americans

11:15 particularly, uh, one of their commercial, uh, attempts a few years ago also tried to send a hopper to the Moon. That particular mission fell over on landing, though, so it's not clear whether the hopper would have actually worked. Now, the Americans have recently sent a number of humans around the Moon in the Artemis 2 mission with the idea of eventually establishing a BAS. It would be similar to a base on Antarctica in the early days. Right, because it wouldn't be permanently manned, probably it would not be a settlement, but it would just be a bunch of scientists doing their job for a short duration of time. And so the Americans are hoping to establish a base in the2030s.

11:49 China, however, is planning to do a very similar thing. It is, together with the Russians and a number of other countries, planning to build its International Lunar Research Station, which is similarly a base, uh, initially that will mostly be robotic, with the idea that eventually humans might also spend some time there. Australia will contribute the rules to one of the next Artemis missions to, in essence, do autonomous experimentation on the surface.

12:12 So, uh, there's lots of scientific questions we can address based on chemical analysis of what you call gravel, which the actual name is regolith, which is lunar soil. And so studying chemist, chemically, what regolith is made up of will tell us a whole variety of things, including where the Moon comes from, the ageing of its surface, whether or not it has acquired a lot of extraterrestrial, let's say, um, uh, interplanetary material through impacts and things like that. So this will allow us to, to refine our understanding of the geology of the Moon.

12:41Stuart Gary That's astrophysicist Professor Richard De

12:43 Jerus from Macquarie University. And this is space time still to come. Finally, some real evidence of activity from the Milky Way supermassive black hole. And later in the Science report, the 2026 Nobel prizes have been awarded in Sweden. All that and more still to come on, uh, space time. Astronomers have discovered a powerful wind blowing from Sagittarius A, the Milky Way's central supermassive black hole. The findings, reported in the Astrophysical Journal letters, follows a 50 year search for evidence supporting the hypothesis that as black holes consume materials, they should produce winds or jets. Theoretical physics tells us that even small amounts of gas falling onto a black hole's accretion

13:43 disc should generate enough energy to push material outwards. But we've never seen that on, um, Sagittarius A. And without any evidence of wind, that would make it a unique outlier. Of course, studying Sagittarius A isn't easy. It has a mass of some 4.3 million times that of our Sun. But it's located at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, 27,000 light years away.

14:07 And it's cloaked in thick clouds of gas, dust and energy. The new evidence comes from the most detailed view yet of how Sagittarius A interacts with and transforms its surrounding environment. One of the study's authors, Mark U.H. gorski from Northwestern University, says this is the first time astronomers have had a clean enough view to see the imprint of the black hole's winds. Gorski and colleagues detected that molecular gas close to the black hole's feeding it. This wind isn't powerful, and its direction probably wanders with time. But it's there.

14:43 Although black holes are infamous for swallowing anything that ventures too close, they don't just pull matter in. They also push some matter out. You see, while they can be hungry monsters, black holes can consume everything at once. So as material falls onto a black hole, it forms an accretion disc, swirling around the black hole's event horizon like water in the sink, forming a whirlpool as it goes down the drain. And as it swirls around in the secretion disc, it's being crushed and ripped apart at the subatomic level, in the process releasing huge amounts of energy. While most of this superheated debris will eventually pass beyond the event horizon, the point of no return, beyond which matter falls forever

15:24 into the singularity. Some will be caught up in powerful magnetic fields and flung outwards in superluminal jets perpendicular to the accretion disc. While astronomers have detected evidence of past eruptions from Sagittarius A, they struggle to detect currently occurring outflows. That's likely because the black hole is going through a quieter phase, making any such outflows incredibly difficult to see. To observe Sagittarius A, the study's authors needed to look through the gas, dust and ionised structures which are clouding the plane of the Milky Way galaxy. Now, using five years of deep observations, by alma, the Atacama Large Millimetre Submillimeter Array telescope in Chile. Gorski and colleagues

16:07 produced the sharpest image ever devised of cold molecular gas surrounding the black hole. And the observations showing gas located incredibly close to Sagittarius A within just three light years of the black hole. They then applied a calibration method to remove the black hole's bright radio signals. And the resulting image is some 100 times deeper and 80 times sharper than any previous maps of this region of space, revealing structures that were completely invisible in previous observations. And one of these newly revealed structures was a vast cone shaped cavity over three light years long and 45 degrees wide, which was devoid of any cold molecular gas.

16:49 Gorski says only hot, energetic wind blowing from Sagittarius A uh, could have created this hollowed out region. He says. If you blow out hot material from the black hole, it's not going to want to exist within the cold material. It's either going to push the cold material out or it'll heat up itself.

17:05 And if it's too hot, you'll no longer see the cold gas. Of course, as Carl Sagan told us, exceptional claims require exceptional evidence. While stars also create winds, stellar winds simply aren't powerful enough, uh, to carve out a, ah, cleanly swept rigid of this size. Even the combined power of all the nearby stars would still fall short. Put simply, the amount of energy needed to create a cavity of this size is greater than can be produced by all the stars in the area. Egoski says. That means there has to be input from the supermassive black hole itself. And if you follow the shape of the cone, it's pointing directly at the black hole. To confirm their findings, the authors used Additional data

17:46 from NASA's Chandra X Ray Space Telescope, which had previously pinpointed bright X ray emissions from the exact same region. Based on how far its effects extend to the nearby stream of hot ionised gas. Gorski and colleagues estimate that this wind has been active for at least 20,000 years. The discovery also confirms that Sagittarius A is relatively quiet compared to supermassive black holes in many other galaxies. I'm sure the majority of other galaxies spend most of their lives in similar quiet states. Many astronomers can only see them when they're also actively feeding and producing jets. Gorski says. While it's great studying black holes while they're active, Sagittarius A starts providing

18:25 astronomers with a window into the life of a black hole. In its quiet state. And from our vantage point that provides a fascinating insight. This is space time,

18:45Tim Mendham Foreign.

18:52Stuart Gary Look at some of the other stories making news

18:54 in Science this week with a Science report. The 2026 Nobel prizes have been awarded in Sweden. The physics prize has gone to Frances Halsen, who realised that the ice at the South Pole could be used to track neutrinos, those near massless, weakly interacting subatomic particles produced in nuclear explosions, atomic reactors, supernovae and the cores of stars, including our sun. Um, his vision led to the development of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a cubic kilometre of ice in Antarctica that uses photomultiplier sensors to detect neutrino interactions with other particles. Through the release of CHERENKOV RADIATION Using IceCube, astronomers have been able to capture neutrinos from extremely energy rich processes in the

19:37 distant universe, opening up a new window. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded to Henrik Hagan and Kensi Soai for the discovery of nonlinear effects and autocatalysts in asymmetric organic synthesis. All amino acids exist in two mirrored variants, but only one of them is found in proteins in living cells and the other is rarely found in nature.

20:01 And Kagan and Kenzo were able to find out how this Homo crality can emerge. Their discoveries have been decisive for chemists to design reactions for pharmaceuticals. Even more amazing, Kagan is a Holocaust survivor who escaped the Nazis and French collaborators during World War II. And the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine has gone to Carl Dezeroff, Peter Hedgeman and George Nagle. For discovery is concerning light, gated ion channels and optogenetics, which allows researchers to use light to switch the activity of selected nerve cells off or on, thereby making it possible to investigate which cells and neural circuits are contributing to particular memories, emotions and behaviours.

20:43 Okay, turning to other news now. And in what appears to be disturbingly similar to China's COVID 19 lab leak which killed millions of people around the world. The Kremlin has denied claims that a, uh, biological weapon based on the plague which it's been developing has escaped the lab and is now spreading through the landscape. The story centres around a 28 year old Russian lab technician who's died in Siberia from what Moscow claims was pneumonia of an unknown origin after just being exposed to a pathogen in a laboratory accident. Apparently she was working with live bacteria at the Irkutsk Research Anti Plague Institute when she accidentally broke a test tube. She was treated, put on a ventilator and placed in

21:22 quarantine, but died two days later. There's now ongoing media Reports of a second death from the same pathogen. And nearly 200 people who had contact with the researchers have now been placed under medical observation, with a number of hospitals and villagers in the area placed in lockdown. Plague symptoms usually appear between one and seven days after exposure. Though pneumonic plague symptoms can sometimes start in as little as 24 hours. Survival rates are usually extremely high, with most patients fully recovering when they're treated within the first 24 hours using common modern antibiotics like streptomycin and dioxycycline. The fact that this victim's death was so rapid and untreatable

22:02 is what's raising questions about the typo research being done at the facility, with the most likely conclusion being a new type of Russian biological weapon having escaped into the population. The World Health Organisation says more than 7.1 million people have been killed by the COVID 19 coronavirus pandemic since it was first detected among three scientists working at China's Wuhan Institute of virology back in September 2019.

22:27 But the Lancet Medical Journal puts the true estimated death toll at uh, likely to be more than 18 million, with over 3 quarters of a billion confirmed cases globally. And scientists in Israel have developed an artificial intelligence programme that can quite literally read your mind. Named Brain it, the technological telepath can tell what people are thinking by just analysing their brain scans and then reproducing that image with shocking accuracy. The findings, reported in the International Conference on Learning Representations, have shown precise reproductions of a person's thoughts, including images ranging from stop signs to olive and tomato pizza, even with the exact number of slices. Scientists built the

23:11 programme by feeding it over 70,000 images that were collected while eight participants looked at various pictures while they were being scanned using a functional MRI machine. Back in 2017, researchers at Purdue University built a version of AI that could predict what image a subject was thinking of, but it could only produce grainy recreations.

23:30 And then, in 2022, Japanese scientists developed a stable diffusion AI. It could more precisely approximate what a subject was thinking about, but it relied on text to image technology. Brain AI takes that more than a generation further, recreating images exactly within just an hour of reading a patient's mind.

23:51 A, uh, diphtheria outbreak has spread to multiple states and territories across Australia. The highly contagious bacterial infection has already been blamed for at least one death in the Northern Territory. The illness was once a major cause of childhood deaths, but that was before widespread vaccination programmes began in the 1930s, dramatically reducing cases in Australia. But the sceptics, Timms Mendham warns anti vaxxers have started spreading lies about the worsening outbreak on social media and that's putting lives at risk.

24:20Tim Mendham Diphtheria is dangerous. It's a disease for

24:23 which there's been a vaccine for a long, long time. Back in the 20s, I think, or 30s, there were vaccine programmes to keep it out. It work. It's important to keep diphtheria down because it can affect people. You need to vaccinate against it. The problem is that the vaccines have been so successful, it's often the case that people don't think diphtheria is an issue. It is. And especially in Australia, certainly in remote areas, indigenous areas where vaccination is not as prolific or people are worried about vaccinations or that sort of thing, that cases of diphtheria arise. There's the people who are out there with the anti vaxxers who are saying that vaccination of diphtheria is either not necessary or it's harmful. Neither

24:55 is the case, but the trouble is people get convinced by that. Or there's an artefact of distance of reaching communities with a vaccination thing. It's a mixture. But it has arisen recently in Australia across various parts, especially the northern part of Australia where there are isolated communities. So perhaps that's an issue there. The falsehoods that follow from that, from the anti vaccination people are, uh, depressing. Once upon a time you have to have vaccinations for a lot of things like smallpox. You don't anymore because it's destroyed. It'd be nice to get all these other communicable diseases that you can have a vaccine for that eventually you will wipe out. Diphtheria we almost had in Australia.

25:29 Diphtheria is there. You just got to keep it under control. The more you keep it under control, the better. It's one of those realities of life that unfortunately there are diseases around there which we can treat as long as you don't get people who are sort of have their axe to grind about vaccination.

25:41Stuart Gary That's the sceptics, Timms Mendham. And this

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