Growth of Structure Seeded by Primordial Black Holes

By K. Mack, Jeremiah P. Ostriker, M. Ricotti. 2006

167 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We discuss the possibilities for the growth of primordial black holes (PBHs) via the accretion of dark matter. In agreement with previous works, we find that accretion during the radiation-dominated era does not lead to a significant mass increase. However, during matter domination, PBHs may grow by up to 2 orders of magnitude in mass through the acquisition of large dark matter halos. We discuss the possibility of PBHs being an important component in dark matter halos of galaxies, as well as their potential to explain the ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs) observed in nearby galactic disks. We point out that although PBHs are ruled out as the dominant component of dark matter, there is still a great deal of parameter space that is open to their playing a role in the modern-day universe. For example, a primordial halo population of PBHs each at 102.5 M☉, making up 0.1% of the dark matter, grows to 104.5 M☉ via the accumulation of dark matter halos and accounts for ~10% of the dark matter mass by a redshift of z ≈ 30. These intermediate-mass black holes may then "light up" when passing through molecular clouds, becoming visible as ULXs at the present day, or they may form the seeds for supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/731805936c139014fd1c83aeac2583e1f55a45d0

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Citations in the corpus

Massive Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter and their detection with Gravitational Waves (2017, background): “In general, massive PBH quick start structure formation, compared to the standard ΛCDM paradigm, since they seed structures much more efficiently than a rare 5σ-fluctuations in the Gaussian primordial spectrum [40].”
Effect of Primordial Black Holes on the Cosmic Microwave Background and Cosmological Parameter Estimates (2007, methodology): “…stars in the Galactic halo (Yoo et al. 2004), have been used to rule out PBHs more massive than 1000 M⊙ as main constituent of the dark matter, but (Mack et al. 2007, hereafter Paper I), summarizing these constraints, find that a domain remains for which massive PBHs can make a significant…”
Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter: Recent Developments (2020, methodology): “Later an improved analysis was provided by Ricotti and colleagues [199–201].”
Primordial black holes confront LIGO/Virgo data: current situation (2020, background): “25 [33, 34]), truncated at a radius rh ' 0.”