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Celestial-Body Focused Dark Matter Annihilation Throughout the Galaxy

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arxiv 2101.12213 v1 pith:AJ5HKPJG submitted 2021-01-28 astro-ph.HE astro-ph.COhep-ph

Celestial-Body Focused Dark Matter Annihilation Throughout the Galaxy

classification astro-ph.HE astro-ph.COhep-ph
keywords annihilationcelestiallimitsannihilatesbodiesbrowndarkdown
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Indirect detection experiments typically measure the flux of annihilating dark matter (DM) particles propagating freely through galactic halos. We consider a new scenario where celestial bodies "focus" DM annihilation events, increasing the efficiency of halo annihilation. In this setup, DM is first captured by celestial bodies, such as neutron stars or brown dwarfs, and then annihilates within them. If DM annihilates to sufficiently long-lived particles, they can escape and subsequently decay into detectable radiation. This produces a distinctive annihilation morphology, which scales as the product of the DM and celestial body densities, rather than as DM density squared. We show that this signal can dominate over the halo annihilation rate in $\gamma$-ray observations in both the Milky Way Galactic center and globular clusters. We use \textit{Fermi} and H.E.S.S. data to constrain the DM-nucleon scattering cross section, setting powerful new limits down to $\sim10^{-39}~$cm$^2$ for sub-GeV DM using brown dwarfs, which is up to nine orders of magnitude stronger than existing limits. We demonstrate that neutron stars can set limits for TeV-scale DM down to about $10^{-47}~$cm$^2$.

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Forward citations

Cited by 7 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. High-Energy Neutrinos from Black Hole Evaporation in Neutron Stars

    hep-ph 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    Dark matter collapsing inside neutron stars could repeatedly form microscopic black holes whose Hawking evaporation produces a detectable high-energy neutrino flux concentrated toward the Galactic Center.

  2. High-Energy Neutrinos from Black Hole Evaporation in Neutron Stars

    hep-ph 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    Repeated collapse of asymmetric dark matter inside neutron stars into evaporating microscopic black holes can produce a Galactic-Center-concentrated high-energy neutrino flux at the 10^-12 GeV cm^-2 s^-1 level, subdom...

  3. Constraints and Projections for Millicharged Dark Matter in the Sun with Water Cherenkov Neutrino Detectors

    hep-ph 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Super-Kamiokande constrains millicharged dark matter at 5-28 GeV for fractional abundance 10^{-4.5}; Hyper-Kamiokande reaches down to 5x10^{-6}.

  4. Probing freeze-in dark matter using Bose-Einstein condensate in neutron star

    hep-ph 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Bose-Einstein condensate formation in neutron stars enhances dark matter annihilation by 10^15-10^20, allowing freeze-in models to produce observable heating and probe neutrino-fog scattering cross-sections.

  5. Super-Kamiokande Strongly Constrains Leptophilic Dark Matter Capture in the Sun

    astro-ph.HE 2025-01 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Super-Kamiokande data constrains the DM-electron scattering cross-section for leptophilic dark matter to ~4e-41 cm2 below 100 GeV, exceeding direct detection by over an order of magnitude.

  6. Constraining dark matter self-interaction from kinetic heating in neutron stars

    hep-ph 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Observation of neutron stars at 1000-1200 K could constrain asymmetric dark matter self-interaction cross-sections by two orders of magnitude beyond bullet cluster limits.

  7. Thermal emission from dark matter-heated neutron stars in the Galactic Center

    astro-ph.HE 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 3.0

    DM-heated neutron stars in the Galactic Center reach equilibrium temperatures of 10^4-10^6 K but their emission is below detection thresholds due to extinction.