Not an astrophysicist - but don't Primordial Black Holes, if fairly common in the solar system as the article suggests, have major "then why don't we see..." problems? Interactions with normal matter (asteroids, planets, moons) would be sharp gamma-generating events. And if even one wandered through the Earth's interior, seismographs would record some otherwise inexplicable data.
metalman•1w ago
my understanding is that the theory posits primordial black holes with an event horizon smaller than a hydrogen nucleus,and have masses that are tiny, so interactions are uncommon and week.
bell-cot•1w ago
The article talks about masses of 10^17 to 10^23 grams being prime candidates for detection. (And also about 10^14 gram ones - in their final stages of evaporation, and thus a different sort of detection problem.)
If I'm not fumbling numbers, a 10^20 gram PBH is good for ~700,000 g's at a distance of 1 meter. And 7^9 g's at 1cm. Close interactions might be uncommon (unless the PBH is "orbiting" within a star or planet), but they would not be weak.
java-man•1w ago