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Primordial black holes are too scarce to explain dark matter

A decades-long survey of a nearby galaxy has detected signals consistent with ancient black holes that could explain dark matter — but the objects would have to be at least ten times more abundant to support the theory.
  1. Eamonn Kerins

    1. Eamonn Kerins is in the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.

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Since the beginning of the 1970s, astrophysical observations have indicated that most of the mass of galaxies resides in an unidentified form. These observations provide some of the strongest evidence for dark matter, a mysterious substance that is thought to dominate matter in the Universe. Its origin and nature form one of the great unsolved problems in astrophysics, but a hypothesis holds that both could be explained by the existence of black holes, known as primordial black holes1 (PBHs), that formed early in the history of the Universe, before the first stars. Writing in Nature, Mróz et al.2 report an analysis of observations of a nearby galaxy from a mammoth 20-year programme known as the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE). Their results set limits on the abundance and masses of PBHs — and, ultimately, rule out the idea of an intriguing connection between dark matter and previously observed gravitational-wave signals3.

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Nature 632, 742-743 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02526-y

References

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  2. Mróz, P. et al. Nature 632, 749–751 (2024).

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  3. Abbott, B. P. et al. Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 061102 (2016).

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Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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