Are black holes and dark matter the same?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/12/211220120813.htm

Their model tweaks the theory first proposed by Hawking and fellow physicist Bernard Carr, who argued that in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang, tiny fluctuations in the density of the universe may have created an undulating landscape with "lumpy" regions that had extra mass. These lumpy areas would collapse into black holes.

That theory did not gain scientific traction, but Cappelluti, Natarajan, and Hasinger suggest it could be valid with some slight modifications. Their model shows that the first stars and galaxies would have formed around black holes in the early universe. They also propose that primordial black holes would have had the ability to grow into supermassive black holes by feasting on gas and stars in their vicinity, or by merging with other black holes.

"Primordial black holes, if they do exist, could well be the seeds from which all the supermassive black holes form, including the one at the center of the Milky Way," Natarajan said. "What I find personally super exciting about this idea is how it elegantly unifies the two really challenging problems that I work on -- that of probing the nature of dark matter and the formation and growth of black holes -- and resolves them in one fell swoop."

Primordial black holes also may resolve another cosmological puzzle: the excess of infrared radiation, synced with X-ray radiation, that has been detected from distant, dim sources scattered around the universe. The study authors said growing primordial black holes would present "exactly" the same radiation signature.

And, best of all, the existence of primordial black holes may be proven -- or disproven -- in the near future, courtesy of the Webb telescope scheduled to launch from French Guiana before the end of the year and the ESA-led Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission planned for the 2030s.