Astronomers Flag 3-Moon-Mass Phoebe as Primordial Black Hole Candidate
Updated
Updated · SciTechDaily · Aug 20
Astronomers Flag 3-Moon-Mass Phoebe as Primordial Black Hole Candidate
1 articles · Updated · SciTechDaily · Aug 20
Summary
A 60-minute brightening of a Large Magellanic Cloud star in December 2019 led astronomers to identify Phoebe, a compact object with an estimated mass about three times the Moon’s.
Microlensing data point to three possibilities—a free-floating planet in the Milky Way, an extragalactic rogue planet in the Large Magellanic Cloud, or a primordial black hole formed just after the Big Bang.
The team says the dark matter halo explanation is 100,000 times more likely than normal stellar populations, making Phoebe a strong primordial black hole candidate.
If confirmed, Phoebe would be far smaller than any stellar-remnant black hole and could rank among the oldest objects ever detected, surviving from the early universe for roughly 13 billion years.