Primordial black hole

Primordial black holes are a hypothetical type of black hole that formed soon after the Big Bang. In the early universe, high densities and inhomogeneous conditions could have led sufficiently dense regions to undergo gravitational collapse, forming black holes. Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich and Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov in 1966 first proposed the existence of such black holes. The theory behind their origins was first studied in depth by Stephen Hawking in 1971. Since primordial black holes did not form from stellar gravitational collapse, their masses can be far below stellar mass (c. 2×1030 kg). Hawking calculated that primordial black holes could weigh as little as 10−8 kg. Primordial black holes are a hypothetical type of black hole that formed soon after the Big Bang. In the early universe, high densities and inhomogeneous conditions could have led sufficiently dense regions to undergo gravitational collapse, forming black holes. Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich and Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov in 1966 first proposed the existence of such black holes. The theory behind their origins was first studied in depth by Stephen Hawking in 1971. Since primordial black holes did not form from stellar gravitational collapse, their masses can be far below stellar mass (c. 2×1030 kg). Hawking calculated that primordial black holes could weigh as little as 10−8 kg. Depending on the model, primordial black holes could have initial masses ranging from 10−8 kg (the so-called Planck relics) to more than thousands of solar masses. However, primordial black holes originally having mass lower than 1011 kg would not have survived to the present due to Hawking radiation, which causes complete evaporation in a time much shorter than the age of the Universe. Primordial black holes are non-baryonic and as such are plausible dark matter candidates. Primordial black holes are also good candidates for being the seeds of the supermassive black holes at the center of massive galaxies, as well as of intermediate-mass black holes. Primordial black holes belong to the class of massive compact halo objects (MACHOs). They are naturally a good dark matter candidate: they are (nearly) collision-less and stable (if sufficiently massive), they have non-relativistic velocities, and they form very early in the history of the Universe (typically less than one second after the Big Bang). Nevertheless, tight limits on their abundance have been set up from various astrophysical and cosmological observations, so that it is now excluded that they contribute significantly to dark matter over most of the plausible mass range. In March 2016, one month after the announcement of the detection by Advanced LIGO/VIRGO of gravitational waves emitted by the merging of two 30 solar mass black holes (about 6×1031 kg), three groups of researchers proposed independently that the detected black holes had a primordial origin. Two of the groups found that the merging rates inferred by LIGO are consistent with a scenario in which all the dark matter is made of primordial black holes, if a non-negligible fraction of them are somehow clustered within halos such as faint dwarf galaxies or globular clusters, as expected by the standard theory of cosmic structure formation. The third group claimed that these merging rates are incompatible with an all-dark-matter scenario and that primordial black holes could only contribute to less than one percent of the total dark matter. The unexpected large mass of the black holes detected by LIGO has strongly revived interest in primordial black holes with masses in the range of 1 to 100 solar masses. It is however still debated whether this range is excluded or not by other observations, such as the absence of micro-lensing of stars, the cosmic microwave background anisotropies, the size of faint dwarf galaxies, and the absence of correlation between X-ray and radio sources towards the galactic center. In May 2016, Alexander Kashlinsky suggested that the observed spatial correlations in the unresolved gamma-ray and X-ray background radiations could be due to primordial black holes with similar masses, if their abundance is comparable to that of dark matter. In April 2019 a study was published suggesting this hypothesis may be a dead end. An international team of researchers has put a theory speculated by the late Stephen Hawking to its most rigorous test to date, and their results have ruled out the possibility that primordial black holes smaller than a tenth of a millimeter make up most of dark matter (journal reference from the article). Primordial black holes could have formed in the very early Universe (less than one second after the Big Bang), during the so-called radiation dominated era. The essential ingredient for the formation of a primordial black hole is a fluctuation in the density of the Universe, inducing its gravitational collapse. One typically requires density contrasts δ ρ / ρ ∼ 0.1 {displaystyle delta ho / ho sim 0.1} (where ρ {displaystyle ho } is the density of the Universe) to form a black hole. There are several mechanisms able to produce such inhomogeneities in the context of cosmic inflation (in hybrid inflation models, for example axion inflation), reheating, or cosmological phase transitions.