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Concept
Primordial black hole
Summary
In cosmology, primordial black holes (PBHs) are hypothetical black holes that formed soon after the Big Bang. In the inflationary era and early radiation-dominated universe, extremely dense pockets of subatomic matter may have been tightly packed to the point of gravitational collapse, creating primordial black holes without the supernova compression needed to make black holes today. Because the creation of primordial black holes would pre-date the first stars, they are not limited to the narrow mass range of stellar black holes.
Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich and Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov in 1966 first proposed the existence of such black holes, while the first in-depth study was conducted by Stephen Hawking in 1971. However, their existence has not been proven and remains theoretical. In September 2022, primordial black holes were proposed by some researchers to explain the unexpected very large early galaxies discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
PBHs have long been considered possibly important if not nearly exclusive components of dark matter, the latter perspective having been strengthened by both LIGO/Virgo interferometer gravitational wave and JWST observations. Early constraints on PBHs as dark matter usually assumed most black holes would have similar or identical ("monochromatic") mass, which was disproven by LIGO/Virgo results, and further suggestions that the actual black hole mass distribution is broadly platykurtic were evident from JWST observations of early large galaxies.
Depending on the model, primordial black holes could have initial masses ranging from e−8kg (the so-called Planck relics) to more than thousands of solar masses. However, primordial black holes originally having mass lower than e11kg would not have survived to the present due to Hawking radiation, which causes complete evaporation in a time much shorter than the age of the Universe. Primordial black holes are non-baryonic, and as such are plausible dark matter candidates.
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