  Recent gravitational wave events have suggested the existence of
near-solar-mass black holes which cannot be formed via stellar evolution. This
has opened up a tantalizing possibility of future detections of both black
holes and naked singularities in this mass range. Existence of naked
singularities is a topical and fundamental physics issue, but their formation
mechanism is not yet clear. Here, we show that some white dwarfs can
realistically transmute into black holes and naked singularities with a wide
range of near- and sub-solar-mass values by capturing asymmetric or
non-self-annihilating primordial dark matter (PDM) particles. We argue that,
while a type Ia supernova due to the accumulation of dark matter at the core of
a white dwarf could also be a possibility, the transmutation of a white dwarf
into a black hole or a naked singularity is a viable consequence of the capture
of non-self-annihilating PDM particles. These white dwarf transmutations can
have a significant role in probing the physics of dark matter and compact
objects, and could be tested using the rates and locations of mergers over the
cosmological time scale.
