Primordial black holes survive SN lensing constraints

Juan García-Bellido, Sébastien Clesse, Pierre Fleury

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

It has been claimed in [arxiv:1712.02240] that massive primordial black holes (PBH) cannot constitute all of the dark matter (DM), because their gravitational-lensing imprint on the Hubble diagram of type Ia supernovae (SN) would be incompatible with present observations. In this note, we critically review those constraints and find several caveats on the analysis. First of all, the constraints on the fraction α of PBH in matter seem to be driven by a very restrictive choice of priors on the cosmological parameters. In particular, the degeneracy between Ωm and α was ignored and thus, by fixing Ωm, transferred the constraining power of SN magnitudes to α. Furthermore, by considering more realistic physical sizes for the type-Ia supernovae, we find an effect on the SN lensing magnification distribution that leads to significantly looser constraints. Moreover, considering a wide mass spectrum of PBH, such as a lognormal distribution, further softens the constraints from SN lensing. Finally, we find that the fraction of PBH that could constitute DM today is bounded by fPBH<1.09(1.38), for JLA (Union 2.1) catalogs, and thus it is perfectly compatible with an all-PBH dark matter scenario in the LIGO band.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)95-100
Number of pages6
JournalPhysics of the Dark Universe
Volume20
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jun 2018

Keywords

  • Dark matter
  • Gravitational lensing
  • Primordial black holes

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