The James Webb Space Telescope has found a lonely black hole in the early universe that’s as heavy as 50 million suns. A major discovery, the object confounds theories of the young cosmos.
I do research on dark matter, and one of the more interesting possibilities I have heard is that these black holes could in theory be formed by directly collapsing dark matter!
There’s and increasing amount of attention being spent investigating a slight modification to the standard Lambda cold dark matter cosmology, by allowing dark matter to have a little bit of self-interactions. These can then allow part of a larger dark matter halo to directly collapse into a black hole.
It’s possible primordial black holes could be dark matter, but there’s only a certain mass range allowed, roughly around the mass of an asteroid, for example.
But somewhat confusingly, these would be poor candidates to seed these massive black holes.
I do research on dark matter, and one of the more interesting possibilities I have heard is that these black holes could in theory be formed by directly collapsing dark matter!
There’s and increasing amount of attention being spent investigating a slight modification to the standard Lambda cold dark matter cosmology, by allowing dark matter to have a little bit of self-interactions. These can then allow part of a larger dark matter halo to directly collapse into a black hole.
I thought the idea behind primordial black holes was that they were what constituted the missing mass of dark matter?
It’s possible primordial black holes could be dark matter, but there’s only a certain mass range allowed, roughly around the mass of an asteroid, for example.
But somewhat confusingly, these would be poor candidates to seed these massive black holes.