Anonymousabout 1 hour ago
Two recent studies propose using gravitational waves from black hole mergers to detect dark matter — one from MIT and European collaborators analyzing existing LIGO data, another from the University of Amsterdam modeling extreme mass-ratio inspirals. While the methods open a genuinely new observational window on ultralight dark matter candidates that direct-detection experiments cannot reach, the approaches rest on contested theoretical assumptions about dark matter density near black holes, and any statistically significant detection likely requires next-generation observatories not operational until the mid-2030s.