Geometric technique reveals the potential for measuring distances to primordial black holes using gamma-ray events, indicating further investigation is feasible.
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 -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 10^3 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 10^5 AU and beyond. Swift
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Xiao et al. (2026) studied this question.
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