Eppur non si trovano: Comments on the Primordial Black Hole Limits in the Galactic Halo
Abstract
In a recent arXiv post, Hawkins & Garcia-Bellido raised doubts on the results of 20-yr long OGLE photometric monitoring, which did not find a large number of gravitational microlensing events in the direction of the Magellanic Clouds. These results implied that primordial black holes and other compact objects with masses from 10^{-8} to 10^3 M_solar cannot comprise a substantial fraction of the Milky Way dark matter halo. Unfortunately, the Hawkins & Garcia-Bellido post contained a number of scientific misrepresentations of our work. Here, we demonstrate that their arguments lack a solid basis or are simply incorrect. As we show below, "and yet they are not found" - compact objects (including primordial black holes) in the dark halo of the Milky Way remain undetected, despite extensive searches.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2510.20005,
title = {Eppur non si trovano: Comments on the Primordial Black Hole Limits in the Galactic Halo},
author = {P. Mróz and A. Udalski and M. K. Szymański and I. Soszyński and Ł. Wyrzykowski and P. Pietrukowicz and S. Kozłowski and R. Poleski and J. Skowron and D. Skowron and K. Ulaczyk and M. Gromadzki and K. Rybicki and P. Iwanek and M. Wrona and M. Ratajczak},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.20005},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
submitted to Acta Astronomica, comment on arXiv:2509.05400