Speaker
Mr
Nicolas Esser
Description
Primordial black holes (PBHs) in the asteroid-mass range remain a viable and until now unconstrained dark matter (DM) candidate. If these PBHs exist, they could be captured by stars in DM-dominated environments such as dwarf galaxies. The capture probability increases with the stellar mass, and captured PBHs would rapidly destroy their host stars. Using photometric observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, we use the non-observation of this destruction process to place constraints on the PBH abundance, and exclude asteroid-mass PBHs from making $100\%$ of the DM at the $3.7\sigma$ level.
Refs: ArXiv 2207.07412, 2311.12658, 2503.03352
Authors
Mr
Nicolas Esser
Peter Tinyakov
(Universite Libre de Bruxelles)
Co-authors
Dr
Carrie Filion
(Flatiron Institute)
Dr
Hannah Richstein
(University of Virginia)
Prof.
Nitya Kallivayalil
(University of Virginia)
Prof.
Rosemary Wyse
(John Hopkins University)
Sven De Rijcke
