The Daily Galaxy: Scientists are still debating whether dark matter, which provides the elusive missing mass needed to keep galaxies from flying apart, is made of microscopic particles or macroscopic bodies. On the “macro” side, dark matter could consist of relatively small black holes that formed in the early Universe. If true, astronomers might detect one of these so-called primordial black holes as gravitational lenses of background stars. The cuurent thinking is that dark matter consists of a new type of particle -a WIMP- that interacts weakly with all the known forces of the universe except gravity, meaning that dark matter is invisible with its presence only detectable via the gravitational pull it exerts. Research from thousands of scientists relying on the most powerful particle accelerators such as Fermi and the LHC in Geneva and Ice Cube in the Antarctica has to detect or creat any particles that might be dark matter, which led Kim Griest, an astrophysicist at the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues to investigate black holes as potential dark matter candidates based on the theory that these "primordial black holes" would be far more difficult to detect, and could potentially exist in large enough numbers to make ...