6

So I was looking through some articles about primordial black holes the other day and it said that these black holes can be insanely tiny. Some of the articles state the mass could range from $10^{12}$ all the way to 1 solar mass.

But how could this be possible if when the matter is compressed to a black hole, the matter if less than the Chandrasekhar limit just becomes a white dwarf or if below Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff becomes a neutron star.

Thank you in advance.

My references are below: https://physicsworld.com/a/concerning-primordial-black-holes/ https://www.livescience.com/dark-matter-made-of-black-holes.html

ZeroTheHero
  • 49,168
  • 21
  • 71
  • 148
Roghan Arun
  • 1,554

2 Answers2

14

Primordial black holes were never stars at any stage in their lifecycle, so those mass limits do not apply to them. See this Wikipedia article.

gandalf61
  • 63,999
9

As you say in the comments to the other answer, it doesn't matter what type of matter it is anyway it is simply a question of density. If there is a region of dense enough matter you get a blackhole.

The early universe was very dense, if small fluctuations of this density are enough to create black holes then you get primordial black holes. These are from matter densely packed in the very early universe even before there were stars or even atoms.

The normal forces you are used to dealing with don't apply to this super dense super hot "primordial soup" of a universe so things like the limits of mass size given by the stellar life cycle were not applicable.

shai horowitz
  • 1,863