Can neutron stars constrain dark matter
By C. Kouvaris, P. Tinyakov. 2010
196 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Because of their strong gravitational field, neutron stars capture weakly interacting dark matter particles (WIMPs) more efficiently compared to other stars, including the white dwarfs. Once captured, the WIMPs sink to the neutron star center and annihilate, heating the star. We find that this heat could lead to detectable effects on the surface temperature of old neutron stars, especially those in dark-matter-rich regions such as the Galactic center or cores of globular clusters. The capture and annihilation is fully efficient even for WIMP-to-nucleon cross sections (elastic or inelastic) as low as {approx}10{sup -45} cm{sup 2}, and for the annihilation cross sections as small as {approx}10{sup -57} cm{sup 2}. Thus, detection of a sufficiently cold neutron star in a dark-matter-rich environment would exclude a wide range of dark matter candidates, including those with extremely small cross sections.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c145c9109497f5973fa9b8e3007905a411eef452
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
In Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Citations in the corpus
- Dynamical boson stars (2012, background): “This temperature increase could be observable in old stars, especially if they are close to the galactic center [240, 114].”
- On the capture of dark matter by neutron stars (2012, background): “Here ρχ is the dark matter density at the location of the neutron star, mχ is the mass of the dark matter particles, M and R are the mass and the radius of the neutron star, respectively, and v̄ is the average velocity of dark matter particles in the Galactic halo [18] and”