Dark Spiky Primordial Black Holes

Speaker: Aurora Ireland (Stanford) In Person

Recent observations of black holes in two nearby low-mass X-ray binaries have indicated the possible presence of dark matter density spikes. While the evidence is compelling, one issue with this interpretation is that light black holes formed from stellar collapse are not expected to form dark matter spikes, and so it is unclear how the stellar-mass black holes in these binaries could have acquired such features. Since primordial black holes are expected to form ultra-dense dark matter mini-spikes, in this talk we explore the possibility that these black holes may actually be primordial in origin.