The Asteroid Mass Window
摘要
Primordial black holes are an attractive dark matter candidate, particularly if they can explain the totality of it. At primordial black hole masses below \(\sim \) \(10^{17}\) g and above \(\sim \) \(10^{23}\) g this possibility is excluded from the variety of arguments and with different confidence. The range in between, often referred to as the “asteroid mass window”, currently remains unconstrained. The most promising, in our view, way to probe this mass range is to use stars as the primordial black hole detectors. If a star captures even a single primordial black hole it starts being accreted onto it and eventually gets destroyed—converted into a sub-solar mass black hole. This process may have a variety of signatures form a mere star disappearance to supernova-type explosions of a new kind. The viability of this approach depends crucially on the probability of primordial black hole capture by stars. In this chapter we summarize the existing capture mechanisms and discuss their implications for constraining the abundance of (or perhaps discovering) primordial black holes in the asteroid mass window.