Using Gravitational Waves to Determine if Primordial Black Holes are Sources of Dark Matter

Scientists do not have much information about or evidence of dark matter. Dark matter does not emit electromagnetic radiation and does not interact with normal matter, but some researchers have found evidence of its existence throughout the universe. Scientists have narrowed down to two possible sources of dark matter: Massive Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs) and Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs). In our research, we analyzed MACHOs, which are primordial black holes, using gravitational wave data from the LIGO/Virgo collaboration. We hypothesized that MACHOs may be dark matter due to the higher black hole mass formed from binary mergers between primordial black holes, compared to the black hole mass between binary mergers from simulated stellar black holes. Using the data derived from primordial black hole pairs, we used Python to perform Bayesian inference parameter estimation to generate another set of simulated datasets (which are stellar black hole pairs) to compare the final masses of the black hole mergers in the simulated and original gravitational wave datasets. Our results showed that primordial black holes (MACHOs) may not be dark matter, but in the future, based on the research on dark matter, astrophysicists’ can further improve understanding of primordial black holes and their effect in the universe.