If Primordial Black Holes are Dark Matter, then a long-term gravitational microlensing survey should find them. It didn't.
An image based on a supercomputer simulation of the cosmological environment where primordial gas undergoes the direct collapse to create black holes. Credit: Aaron Smith/TACC/UT-Austin.
In this case, the effort to understand dark matter entails looking back in time to the Universe’s formative years. But the further we look back to that dimly-lit period, the more we rely on theory. This is where we find Can LIGO-Virgo’s results be explained by PBHs? As we’ve detected more gravitational waves, physicists have wondered if some of them are evidence of merging PBHs.
OGLE recently released 20 years of observational data of almost 80 million stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. The data is from 2001 to 2020 and includes the search for gravitational microlensing events. Since OGLE is so sensitive, it should’ve also found more low-mass microlensing events. “Our experiment has the highest sensitivity to PBHs with masses of 0.01 M ; we should have detected more than 1100 events if the entire dark matter were composed of such objects,” the authors write in their paper.
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