Speaker
Description
If primordial black holes (PBHs) of asteroidal mass 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 PBHs, are performed. We find that the gravitational effect of the PBHs is dominated by the closest encounter. Using the Earth–Mars distance as an observational probe, we show that the perturbations are smaller than the current uncertainties in solar system ephemerides and thus PBHs are not constrained. We estimate that an improvement in the accuracy of the ephemerides by an order of magnitude or the extraction of signals well below the noise level is required to detect the gravitational influence of PBHs in the solar system in the foreseeable future.
