| Issue |
A&A
Volume 709, May 2026
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | L18 | |
| Number of page(s) | 4 | |
| Section | Letters to the Editor | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202660258 | |
| Published online | 20 May 2026 | |
Letter to the Editor
Geometric search for Hawking radiation from nearby primordial black holes
1
School of Physics and Electronic Science, Guizhou Normal University, Guiyang 550001, PR China
2
Key Laboratory of Particle Astrophysics, Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
3
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
★ Corresponding author: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Received:
6
April
2026
Accepted:
26
April
2026
Abstract
A nearby primordial-black-hole (PBH) evaporation burst would produce a curved gamma-ray wavefront, leading to detectable departures from plane-wave inter-satellite delays. We introduce a geometric method that combines imaging localizations with multi-spacecraft timing to determine the distance of a gamma-ray transient. Applied to Swift-localized short GRBs, the most constraining event reaches 1.2 AU, already probing a meaningful Solar System-scale regime. Our analysis shows that direct distance measurements are achievable to 103 AU scales with the current and near-future technical capabilities. Once a finite source distance is measured, the corresponding PBH mass and lifetime can be directly inferred. Future wide-field localization and long-baseline deep-space gamma-ray detectors could extend such searches to 105 AU and beyond.
Key words: methods: analytical / methods: data analysis / methods: observational
© The Authors 2026
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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