No massive black holes in the Milky Way halo

Przemek Mróz (), Andrzej Udalski, Michał K. Szymański, Igor Soszyński, Łukasz Wyrzykowski, Paweł Pietrukowicz, Szymon Kozłowski, Radosław Poleski, Jan Skowron, Dorota Skowron, Krzysztof Ulaczyk, Mariusz Gromadzki, Krzysztof Rybicki, Patryk Iwanek, Marcin Wrona and Milena Ratajczak
Additional contact information
Przemek Mróz: University of Warsaw
Andrzej Udalski: University of Warsaw
Michał K. Szymański: University of Warsaw
Igor Soszyński: University of Warsaw
Łukasz Wyrzykowski: University of Warsaw
Paweł Pietrukowicz: University of Warsaw
Szymon Kozłowski: University of Warsaw
Radosław Poleski: University of Warsaw
Jan Skowron: University of Warsaw
Dorota Skowron: University of Warsaw
Krzysztof Ulaczyk: University of Warsaw
Mariusz Gromadzki: University of Warsaw
Krzysztof Rybicki: University of Warsaw
Patryk Iwanek: University of Warsaw
Marcin Wrona: University of Warsaw
Milena Ratajczak: University of Warsaw

Nature, 2024, vol. 632, issue 8026, 749-751

Abstract: Abstract The gravitational wave detectors have shown a population of massive black holes that do not resemble those observed in the Milky Way1–3 and whose origin is debated4–6. According to a possible explanation, these black holes may have formed from density fluctuations in the early Universe (primordial black holes)7–9, and they should comprise several to 100% of dark matter to explain the observed black hole merger rates10–12. If these black holes existed in the Milky Way dark matter halo, they would cause long-timescale gravitational microlensing events lasting years13. The previous experiments were not sufficiently sensitive to such events14–17. Here we present the results of the search for long-timescale microlensing events among the light curves of nearly 80 million stars located in the Large Magellanic Cloud that were monitored for 20 years by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment survey18. We did not find any events with timescales longer than 1 year, whereas all shorter events detected may be explained by known stellar populations. We find that compact objects in the mass range from 1.8 × 10−4M⊙ to 6.3M⊙ cannot make up more than 1% of dark matter, and those in the mass range from 1.3 × 10−5M⊙ to 860 M⊙ cannot make up more than 10% of dark matter. Thus, primordial black holes in this mass range cannot simultaneously explain a substantial fraction of dark matter and gravitational wave events.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07704-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:632:y:2024:i:8026:d:10.1038_s41586-024-07704-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07704-6

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().