Gravitational interaction of celestial bodies and black holes with particle dark matter

Black holes are neither particle accelerators nor dark matter probes.

It has been suggested that maximally spinning black holes can serve as particle accelerators, reaching arbitrarily high center-of-mass energies. Despite several objections regarding the practical achievability of such high energies, and demonstrations past and present that such large energies could never reach a distant observer, interest in this problem has remained substantial. We show that, ...

Black Holes as Dark Matter

While the energy of the universe has been established to be about 0.04 baryons, 0.24 dark matter and 0.72 dark energy, the cosmological entropy is almost entirely, about (1−10), from black holes and only 10 from everything else. This identification of all dark matter as black holes is natural in statistical mechanics. Cosmological history of dark matter is discussed. [email protected]

Black Holes as Dark Matter Annihilation “Boosters”

The presence and growth of Intermediate and Supermassive Black Holes modify the surrounding distribution of stars and Dark Matter, and inevitably affect the prospects for indirectly detecting Dark Matter through its annihilation products. We show here that under specific circumstances, Black Holes can act as Dark Matter annihilation “boosters”. In particular, we show that mini-spikes, i.e. Dark...

Dark Matter Accretion into Supermassive Black Holes

Strong Gravitational Lensing as a Probe of Gravity, Dark- Matter and Super-Massive Black Holes

Whereas considerable effort has been afforded in understanding the properties of galaxies, a full physical picture, connecting their baryonic and dark-matter content, supermassive black holes, and (metric) theories of gravity, is still ill-defined. Strong gravitational lensing furnishes a powerful method to probe gravity in the central regions of galaxies. It can (1) provide a unique detectionc...