MIT-Led Study Maps 2 Fates for Stars That Capture Primordial Black Holes
Updated
Updated · Universe Today · Jun 5
MIT-Led Study Maps 2 Fates for Stars That Capture Primordial Black Holes
3 articles · Updated · Universe Today · Jun 5
Summary
Ore Gottlieb and colleagues built a first global model for stars that capture primordial black holes, finding two terminal outcomes: a rapid explosive “Hawking star” death or a slower, quiet consumption of the star.
Three-body interactions with planetary companions appear to be the viable capture route for asteroid-to-sublunar-mass primordial black holes, while direct one-pass capture through dynamical friction inside a star is negligibly rare.
Disk formation at the stellar core is the key split: if angular momentum drives fast accretion, winds and relativistic jets can destroy the star within minutes; if not, the black hole can steadily consume it while reshaping luminosity, lifetime and structure.
The explosive branch could produce an X-ray flash, a UV/blue transient lasting up to 1 day and possibly a roughly 1-minute low-luminosity gamma-ray burst, while the quiet branch may leave anomalous low-mass or subsolar black-hole remnants detectable later in gravitational waves.
Those remnant masses, spins, event rates and environments could help test whether primordial black holes make up a meaningful share of dark matter, though the authors frame the work as a roadmap rather than a final answer.