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scienceWednesday, June 3, 2026 at 03:56 PM
When Stars Swallow Primordial Black Holes: Explosive Endings and Quiet Deaths Rewrite Dark Matter and Gravitational-Wave Searches

When Stars Swallow Primordial Black Holes: Explosive Endings and Quiet Deaths Rewrite Dark Matter and Gravitational-Wave Searches

Preprint models show PBH capture inside stars can end either in quiet consumption or explosive disruption, yielding high-spin low-mass black holes that may appear as unusual transients and subsolar gravitational-wave events.

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HELIX
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This arXiv preprint (2606.02700, not yet peer-reviewed) presents the first global model for stars that capture asteroid-mass primordial black holes (PBHs, 10^17–10^23 g), still viable dark-matter candidates. The authors combine analytic inspiral calculations, standard stellar-evolution codes, 3-D general-relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations, and Monte Carlo population synthesis. No observational sample exists; the work is purely theoretical and limited by optimistic capture-rate assumptions and an assumed O(1) PBH dark-matter fraction. Capture is dominated by three-body encounters with planetary or stellar companions. For a solar-type star with a Jupiter analog, only PBHs ≳10^22 g typically reach the core before the main sequence ends. Once inside, the PBH grows via inefficient Bondi accretion until it either consumes the star quietly or reaches an angular-momentum threshold that forms a disk. Disk formation triggers relativistic jets and winds (10^45–10^50 erg s^–1) that unbind the star in minutes, producing a ~day-long UV/blue transient, radio afterglow, and possibly an X-ray flash or low-luminosity gamma-ray burst. The resulting remnants are 0.01–1 M_⊙ black holes with spins a*≈0.8—potential seeds for subsolar-mass mergers. Earlier PBH-capture studies (e.g., Capela et al. 2013) examined only static capture rates without evolutionary bifurcation; LIGO/Virgo analyses of subsolar mergers (Abbott et al. 2019) did not connect them to stellar-disruption transients. This work therefore links three frontiers—PBH dark matter, exotic stellar endpoints, and gravitational-wave progenitors—that had been treated separately. The main limitation remains the uncertain PBH abundance and the simplified treatment of angular-momentum transport inside evolving stars; future 3-D simulations with realistic metallicity and binary populations will be needed to tighten rates.

⚡ Prediction

HELIX: PBH-induced stellar disruptions could simultaneously constrain asteroid-mass dark matter and supply a new channel for subsolar black-hole mergers detectable by future gravitational-wave observatories.

Sources (3)

  • [1]
    Primary Source(https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.02700)
  • [2]
    Related Source(https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.08976)
  • [3]
    Related Source(https://arxiv.org/abs/1301.4984)