Dark Matter And The Habitability of Planets

Abstract

In many models, dark matter particles can elastically scatter with nuclei in planets, causing those particles to become gravitationally bound. While the energy expected to be released through the subsequent annihilations of dark matter particles in the interior of the Earth is negligibly small (a few megawatts in the most optimistic models), larger planets that reside in regions with higher densities of slow moving dark matter could plausibly capture and annihilate dark matter at a rate high enough to maintain liquid water on their surfaces, even in the absence of additional energy from starlight or other sources. On these rare planets, it may be dark matter rather than light from a host star that makes it possible for life to emerge, evolve, and survive.

9 pages, 3 figures, updated calculations with a larger velocity dispersion for the central portion of the Milky Way

References in corpus (23)

• A Universal Density Profile from Hierarchical Clustering
• The Structure of Cold Dark Matter Halos
• New results from DAMA/LIBRA
• Results from the Final Exposure of the CDMS II Experiment
• Results from a Search for Light-Mass Dark Matter with a P-type Point Contact Germanium Detector
• Cuspy No More: How Outflows Affect the Central Dark Matter and Baryon Distribution in Lambda CDM Galaxies
• Internal Structure of Massive Terrestrial Planets
• Results from a Low-Energy Analysis of the CDMS II Germanium Data
• A novel determination of the local dark matter density
• Core-Accretion Model Predicts Few Jovian-Mass Planets Orbiting Red Dwarfs
• First Dark Matter Results from the XENON100 Experiment
• The N2K Consortium. II. A Transiting Hot Saturn Around HD 149026 With a Large Dense Core
• Detailed Models of super-Earths: How well can we infer bulk properties?
• Towards Closing the Window on Strongly Interacting Dark Matter: Far-Reaching Constraints from Earth's Heat Flow
• Time-Dependent Models for Dark Matter at the Galactic Center
• Transiting extrasolar planetary candidates in the Galactic bulge
• Model Independent Form Factors for Spin Independent Neutralino-Nucleon Scattering from Elastic Electron Scattering Data
• A Consistent Dark Matter Interpretation For CoGeNT and DAMA/LIBRA
• Dark Matter Dynamics and Indirect Detection
• Astrophysical inputs on the SUSY dark matter annihilation detectability
• WIMP diffusion in the solar system including solar depletion and its effect on Earth capture rates
• Resolving Gas Dynamics in the Circumnuclear Region of a Disk Galaxy in a Cosmological Simulation
• Fabry-Perot Absorption Line Spectroscopy of the Galactic Bar. I. Kinematics

Cited by in corpus (4)

• The Ĝ Infrared Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations with Large Energy Supplies. II. Framework, Strategy, and First Result
• Exoplanets as Sub-GeV Dark Matter Detectors
• Novel constraints on fifth forces and ultralight dark sector with asteroidal data
• Eta-Earth Revisited II: Deriving a Maximum Number of Earth-like Habitats in the Galactic Disk