Direct detection of Black Holes via electromagnetic radiation

Abstract

Many black hole (BH) candidates exist, ranging from supermassive ($\sim 10^6$--$10^{10}$ M${}_{\odot }$) to stellar masses ($\sim 1$--$100$ M${}_{\odot }$), all of them identified by indirect processes. Although there are no known candidate BHs with sub-stellar masses, these might have been produced in the primordial Universe. BHs emit radiation composed of photons, gravitons and, later in their lifes, massive particles. We explored the detection of such BHs with present day masses from $10^{-22}$ M${}_{\odot }$ to $10^{-11}$ M${}_{\odot }$. We determined the maximum distances ($d$) at which the current best detectors should be placed in order to identify such isolated BHs. Broadly, we conclude that in the visible and ultraviolet BHs can be directly detected at $d\lesssim 10^7$ m while in the X-ray band the distances might reach $\sim 10^8$ m (of the order of the Earth-Moon distance) and in the $\gamma$-ray band BHs might even be detected from as far as $\sim 0.1$ pc. Since these results give us realistic hopes of directly detecting BHs, we suggest the scrutiny of current and future space mission data to reach this goal.

arXiv comment8 pages, 2 figures and 2 tables

References in corpus (21)

• The Large Area Telescope on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope Mission
• The Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) for the Spitzer Space Telescope
• The Photodetector Array Camera and Spectrometer (PACS) on the Herschel Space Observatory
• The Herschel-SPIRE instrument and its in-flight performance
• The Galactic Center Massive Black Hole and Nuclear Star Cluster
• New cosmological constraints on primordial black holes
• Black Holes at the LHC
• The formation of massive black holes through collision runaway in dense young star clusters
• The Expanded Very Large Array -- a New Telescope for New Science
• XMM-Newton observation of the Lockman Hole; I. The X-ray Data
• The Mass of the Black Hole in Cygnus X-1
• Active Galactic Nuclei with Candidate Intermediate-Mass Black Holes
• Black Holes from Cosmic Rays: Probes of Extra Dimensions and New Limits on TeV-Scale Gravity
• Will we observe black holes at LHC?
• Local Flux of Low-Energy Antiprotons from Evaporating Primordial Black Holes
• Is there an upper limit to black hole masses?
• Primordial black holes as a source of extremely high energy cosmic rays
• Constraints on primordial black holes and primeval density perturbations from the epoch of reionization
• The Absolute Flux Distribution of LDS749B
• Potential of the next generation VHE instruments to probe the EBL (I): the low- and mid-VHE
• The influence of quarks and gluons jets coming from primordial black holes on the reionization of the Universe

Cited by in corpus (5)

• The 511 keV Excess and Primordial Black Holes
• New thresholds for Primordial Black Hole formation during the QCD phase transition
• Stellar mass Primordial Black Holes as Cold Dark Matter
• Hawking Radiation Signatures from Primordial Black Holes Transiting the Inner Solar System: Prospects for Detection
• The effect of redshift degeneracy and the damping effect of viscous medium on the information extracted from gravitational wave signals