Did LIGO Detect Dark Matter?

By Simeon Bird, I. Cholis, Julian B. Muñoz, Yacine Ali-Haïmoud, M. Kamionkowski, E. Kovetz, A. Raccanelli, A. Riess. Physical Review Letters, 2016

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We consider the possibility that the black-hole (BH) binary detected by LIGO may be a signature of dark matter. Interestingly enough, there remains a window for masses 20M_{⊙}≲M_{bh}≲100M_{⊙} where primordial black holes (PBHs) may constitute the dark matter. If two BHs in a galactic halo pass sufficiently close, they radiate enough energy in gravitational waves to become gravitationally bound. The bound BHs will rapidly spiral inward due to the emission of gravitational radiation and ultimately will merge. Uncertainties in the rate for such events arise from our imprecise knowledge of the phase-space structure of galactic halos on the smallest scales. Still, reasonable estimates span a range that overlaps the 2-53 Gpc^{-3} yr^{-1} rate estimated from GW150914, thus raising the possibility that LIGO has detected PBH dark matter. PBH mergers are likely to be distributed spatially more like dark matter than luminous matter and have neither optical nor neutrino counterparts. They may be distinguished from mergers of BHs from more traditional astrophysical sources through the observed mass spectrum, their high ellipticities, or their stochastic gravitational wave background. Next-generation experiments will be invaluable in performing these tests.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6326b324294fa6fd6ac65d4d22bd2917f5566fe3

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Citations in the corpus

Gravitational probes of dark matter physics (2017, background): “If dark matter consists of ∼ 100M primordial black holes, they can be detected with gravitational waves at LIGO, stellar microlensing, or stellar dynamics in ultrafaint dwarf galaxies [652, 653, 62, 113].”
Gravitational wave signatures of inflationary models from Primordial Black Hole dark matter (2017, background): “The most interesting range is that of MPBH ∼ O (10)M (where M ' 2×1033g is the solar mass), since collisions of PBH in this mass range may be responsible for the GW signals observed at LIGO [4, 33, 34].”
WIMP dark matter candidates and searches—current status and future prospects (2017, background): “The idea of PBHs as DM has recently been revived with a suggestion that the first detection of gravitational waves by LIGO [39] could be potentially explained in terms of two coalescing PBHs [40].”
CONSTRAINTS ON MACHO DARK MATTER FROM COMPACT STELLAR SYSTEMS IN ULTRA-FAINT DWARF GALAXIES (2016, background): “However, other authors have argued that these constraints may not be definitive (Bird et al. 2016).”
Black Hole Mergers in Galactic Nuclei Induced by the Eccentric Kozai–Lidov Effect (2017, background): “…et al. 2016), cores of massive stars (Reisswig et al. 2013; Loeb 2016; Woosley 2016), or dark matter halos comprised of primordial black holes (Bird et al. 2016; 1 http://www.ligo.org/ 2 http://www.virgo-gw.eu/ 3 http://gwcenter.icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/ Clesse & García-Bellido 2016; Sasaki et…”
Steepest growth of the power spectrum and primordial black holes (2018, background): “This was largely sparked by the question posed in [1] (see also [2, 3]) — whether the order ten solar mass black holes observed by LIGO [4] could be primordial.”
Primordial black holes confront LIGO/Virgo data: current situation (2020, background): “[8] has been strongly revisited by later work, in particular after GW150914 and the suggestion that those BHs might be of primordial origin [5].”
Primordial black holes as generators of cosmic structures (2018, background): “B. P. Abbott et al. (LIGO Collaboration), ApJ 659, 918 (2007).”
Primordial Black Hole Scenario for the Gravitational-Wave Event GW150914. (2016, background): “Second, in [10] the fraction of PBHs in dark matter to explain the estimated gravitational-wave event rate by the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration is of order unity, while in our case we require it to be as small as the upper limit obtained in [9].”
Analytic description of primordial black hole formation from scalar field fragmentation (2019, background): “[24–31]), formation of supermassive black holes [25, 32, 33] as well as r-process nucleosynthesis [34], gamma-ray bursts and microquasars [35] from compact star disruptions.”
Primordial black holes from inflation and non-Gaussianity (2018, neutral): “n=2 1 n! S[n] ) = 1 + 1 2! S[2] + 1 3! S[3] + 1 4! ( 3S[2](2) + S[4] ) + 1 5! ( 10S[2]S[3] + S[5] ) · · ·”