Primordial Black Hole Scenario for the Gravitational-Wave Event GW150914.

By Misao Sasaki, T. Suyama, Takahiro Tanaka, Shuichiro Yokoyama. Physical Review Letters, 2016

740 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We point out that the gravitational-wave event GW150914 observed by the LIGO detectors can be explained by the coalescence of primordial black holes (PBHs). It is found that the expected PBH merger rate would exceed the rate estimated by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo Collaboration if PBHs were the dominant component of dark matter, while it can be made compatible if PBHs constitute a fraction of dark matter. Intriguingly, the abundance of PBHs required to explain the suggested lower bound on the event rate, >2  events  Gpc^{-3} yr^{-1}, roughly coincides with the existing upper limit set by the nondetection of the cosmic microwave background spectral distortion. This implies that the proposed PBH scenario may be tested in the not-too-distant future.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bbc185550a275caad69f857bea0a7ddb0cfb5d0f

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Citations in the corpus

• Primordial Black Holes as Dark Matter: Recent Developments (2020, background): “[44] argued that the lower limit on the merger rate would be in tension with the CMB distortion constraints if the PBHs provided all the dark matter, although one might avoid these constraints if the LIGO/Virgo back holes derive from the accretion and merger of smaller PBHs [272].”
• Primordial black holes with an accurate QCD equation of state (2018, background): “1% of DM is made up of PBHs in the LIGO mass range [13, 14, 57, 58] (assuming that the PBHs are not initially clustered).”
• 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 HOLE FORMATION IN THE MATTER-DOMINATED PHASE OF THE UNIVERSE (2016, background): “Furthermore, recently, LIGO has reported gravitational wave observations of GW150914 (Abbott et al. 2016), and it has been argued (Sasaki et al. 2016) that a binary system of primordial black holes can be a source of gravitational waves of this event.”
• Primordial black holes as generators of cosmic structures (2018, background): “…popular recently (Carr, Kuhnel & Sandstad 2016; Chapline & Frampton 2016) - especially since the discovery of black hole coalesences by LIGO (Bird et al. 2016; Clesse & Garcia-Bellido 2017b), although this may only require a small fraction of the dark matter to be in PBHs (Sasaki et al. 2016).”
• Solving puzzles of GW150914 by primordial black holes (2016, result): “For PBHs with the mass 30M the predicted event rate of GW bursts [15] matches the one observed by LIGO only for f ' 7× 10−4–7× 10−3.”
• Revisiting constraints on asteroid-mass primordial black holes as dark matter candidates (2019, background): “Recent discoveries of binary black hole mergers with ∼ 10M [32–35] have posed challenges to stellar evolution theories, reviving the enthusiasm about PBHs as DM in that mass range [36–43].”
• Primordial black holes as dark matter candidates (2021, background): “[172] argued that the merger rate would be in tension with the CMB distortion constraints unless the PBHs provided only a small fraction of the DM.”
• Black Hole Mergers From Globular Clusters Observable by LISA I: Eccentric Sources Originating From Relativistic N-body Dynamics (2018, background): “…et al. 2015, 2016a,b,b; Askar et al. 2017; Park et al. 2017), single-single GW captures of primordial BHs (Bird et al. 2016; Cholis et al. 2016; Sasaki et al. 2016; Carr et al. 2016), active galactic nuclei discs (Bartos et al. 2017; Stone et al. 2017; McKernan et al. 2017), galactic nuclei…”
• 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.”