We present the first search for gravitational waves from the coalescence of stellar mass and subsolar mass black holes with masses between 20-100 M_{⊙} and 0.01-1 M_{⊙}(10-10^{3} M_{J}), respectively. The observation of a single subsolar mass black hole would establish the existence of primordial black holes and a possible component of dark matter. We search the ∼164 day of public LIGO data from 2015-2017 when LIGO-Hanford and LIGO-Livingston were simultaneously observing. We find no significant candidate gravitational-wave signals. Using this nondetection, we place a 90% upper limit on the rate of 30-0.01 M_{⊙} and 30-0.1 M_{⊙} mergers at <1.2×10^{6} and <1.6×10^{4} Gpc^{-3} yr^{-1}, respectively. If we consider binary formation through direct gravitational-wave braking, this kind of merger would be exceedingly rare if only the lighter black hole were primordial in origin (<10^{-4} Gpc^{-3} yr^{-1}). If both black holes are primordial in origin, we constrain the contribution of 1(0.1)M_{⊙} black holes to dark matter to <0.3(3)%.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.021103 | DOI Listing |
Phys Rev Lett
September 2024
INFN, Sezione di Roma, I-00185 Roma, Italy.
Gravitational waves from subsolar mass inspiraling compact objects would provide almost smoking-gun evidence for primordial black holes (PBHs). We perform the first search for inspiraling planetary-mass compact objects in equal-mass and highly asymmetric mass-ratio binaries using data from the first half of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA third observing run. Though we do not find any significant candidates, we determine the maximum luminosity distance reachable with our search to be of O(0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNature
June 2023
School of Earth and Space Exploration, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA.
In the first billion years after the Big Bang, sources of ultraviolet (UV) photons are believed to have ionized intergalactic hydrogen, rendering the Universe transparent to UV radiation. Galaxies brighter than the characteristic luminosity L* (refs. ) do not provide enough ionizing photons to drive this cosmic reionization.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNature
February 2023
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA.
The Saturn-mass exoplanet WASP-39b has been the subject of extensive efforts to determine its atmospheric properties using transmission spectroscopy. However, these efforts have been hampered by modelling degeneracies between composition and cloud properties that are caused by limited data quality. Here we present the transmission spectrum of WASP-39b obtained using the Single-Object Slitless Spectroscopy (SOSS) mode of the Near Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) instrument on the JWST.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNature
February 2023
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, USA.
Measuring the abundances of carbon and oxygen in exoplanet atmospheres is considered a crucial avenue for unlocking the formation and evolution of exoplanetary systems. Access to the chemical inventory of an exoplanet requires high-precision observations, often inferred from individual molecular detections with low-resolution space-based and high-resolution ground-based facilities. Here we report the medium-resolution (R ≈ 600) transmission spectrum of an exoplanet atmosphere between 3 and 5 μm covering several absorption features for the Saturn-mass exoplanet WASP-39b (ref.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhys Rev Lett
August 2022
The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, USA.
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