Primordial Black Holes in the Solar System

Abstract

If primordial black holes (PBHs) of asteroidal mass ($M_{\rm PBH}\in[10^{17},10^{23}]$ g) make up the entire dark matter they could be detectable through their gravitational influence in the solar system. In this work we study the perturbations that PBHs induce on the orbits of planets. Detailed numerical simulations of the solar system, embedded in a halo of primordial black holes are performed. We show that the perturbations are too small to be directly detectable with current data, challenging recent results that have ruled out PBHs as a dark matter candidate. Using the Earth-Mars system as an observational probe, we estimate that an improvement in the measurement accuracy by more than an order of magnitude is required to detect the gravitational influence of PBHs in the solar system in the foreseeable future.