Searching for Dark Matter Annihilation from Milky Way Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxies with Six Years of Fermi Large Area Telescope Data.

By M. Ackermann, A. Albert, B. Anderson, W. Atwood, L. Baldini, G. Barbiellini, D. Bastieri, K. Bechtol, R. Bellazzini, E. Bissaldi and 116 more. Physical Review Letters, 2015

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The dwarf spheroidal satellite galaxies (dSphs) of the Milky Way are some of the most dark matter (DM) dominated objects known. We report on γ-ray observations of Milky Way dSphs based on six years of Fermi Large Area Telescope data processed with the new Pass8 event-level analysis. None of the dSphs are significantly detected in γ rays, and we present upper limits on the DM annihilation cross section from a combined analysis of 15 dSphs. These constraints are among the strongest and most robust to date and lie below the canonical thermal relic cross section for DM of mass ≲100 GeV annihilating via quark and τ-lepton channels.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/556b0c94d150fff05f040044d2f6a927185fdcb6

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Citations in the corpus

CONSTRAINTS ON MACHO DARK MATTER FROM COMPACT STELLAR SYSTEMS IN ULTRA-FAINT DWARF GALAXIES (2016, background): “They currently provide the best constraints on annihilating weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), ruling out the simplest thermal relic cross-sections for particle masses of tens of GeV (Ackermann et al. 2015).”
The Local Group on FIRE: dwarf galaxy populations across a suite of hydrodynamic simulations (2018, background): “…the Universe (e.g. McConnachie 2012), these dwarf galaxies provide crucial tests of the standard structure formation paradigm, cold dark matter with a cosmological constant [Lambda cold dark matter ( CDM)], and may ultimately indirectly reveal the nature of DM itself (e.g. Ackermann et al. 2015).”
Born–Infeld inspired modifications of gravity (2017, background): “This degeneracy is more prominent owing to the lack of experimental signatures from laboratory experiments and particle accelerators, despite the existence of different ongoing galactic [342, 5], cosmic rays [23], CMB [7], collider [100] and underground laboratory [9] searches.”
SEARCHING FOR DARK MATTER ANNIHILATION IN RECENTLY DISCOVERED MILKY WAY SATELLITES WITH FERMI-LAT (2016, methodology): “Assuming that the J-factors of the new systems can be measured with an uncertainty of 0.6 dex, the improvement in 12 sensitivity is a factor of ∼ 1.5 for hard annihilation spectra (e.g., the τ+τ− channel) compared to the median expected limits in Ackermann et al. (2015b).”
History of dark matter (2018, positive): “…conclusion that most of the observed gamma-ray emission could be attributed to known gamma-ray source classes (such as active galactic nuclei), although it remains possible that a non-negligible component of the high-latitude background could originate from dark matter (Ackermann et al., 2015a).”
Small-Scale Challenges to the ΛCDM Paradigm (2017, neutral): “Cold Dark Matter (CDM): m ∼ 100 GeV, vz=0th ≈ 0 km s −1 Warm Dark Matter (WDM): m ∼ 1 keV, vz=0th ∼ 0.03 km s −1 Hot Dark Matter (HDM): m ∼ 1 eV, vz=0th ∼ 30 km s −1 A general class of models that are appealing in their simplicity is that of thermal relics.”
Dark matter direct-detection experiments (2015, background): “ongest and most robust constraints can be derived by the Fermi-LAT observation of dwarf spheroidal satellite galaxies of the Milky Way as those are some of the most dark matter dominated objects known[87][88]. Consequently, conservative limits on the annihilation cross-section of dark matter particl”