Unveiling the hidden population of black holes in the dark matter halos of galaxies

Paper Title:

Constraints on the Abundance of PBHs from X-ray Quasar Microlensing Observations: Substellar to Planetary Mass Range

Published on:

14 July 2023

Primary Category:

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Paper Authors:

A. Esteban-Gutiérrez,

E. Mediavilla,

J. Jiménez-Vicente,

J. A. Muñoz

Bullets

Key Details

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Microlensing of lensed quasars is a powerful probe of dark matter in the form of compact objects like black holes

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X-ray observations are sensitive to microlensing by lower mass black holes than optical data

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Bayesian analysis used to calculate probability of different black hole populations based on microlensing data

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Abundance of substellar to planetary mass black holes is negligible based on microlensing constraints

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New limits set on fraction of dark matter composed of black holes from 0.005 to 100 solar masses

Explore the topics in this paper

astronomy

astrophysics

black holes

dark matter

gravitational lensing

AI generated summary

Unveiling the hidden population of black holes in the dark matter halos of galaxies

This paper uses gravitational microlensing of distant quasars to search for primordial black holes of substellar to planetary mass in the dark matter halos of lensing galaxies. The results indicate the abundance of these black holes is negligible, providing stringent constraints on their contribution to dark matter in the mass range from 0.005 to 100 solar masses.