Primordial black holes, formed during the first second of the life of the Universe, are one of many dark matter candidates. Now, Sai Wang and colleagues have used gravitational wave data from Advanced LIGO to tighten the upper limit on the abundance of primordial black holes by an order of magnitude.
If merger events between binary primordial black holes are common, then they should provide a stochastic background signal in the Advanced LIGO data. The first Advanced LIGO run didn’t find evidence for such a signal, so the authors use this fact to constrain the energy density spectrum of primordial black holes as a function of their mass. For black holes between 1 and 100 solar masses, the total contribution to dark matter can be, at most, in the range of a few percent.
The enhanced sensitivity of future Advanced LIGO detection runs should give a measurable stochastic background signal and allow an even more stringent estimate of primordial black hole abundance.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Abergel, D. Black hole limits. Nature Phys 14, 528 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-018-0175-z
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-018-0175-z
