Celestial Objects as Strongly-Interacting Non-Annihilating Dark Matter Detectors

Abstract

Non-annihilating dark matter particles, owing to their interactions with ordinary baryonic matter, can efficiently accumulate inside celestial objects. For heavy mass, they gravitate toward the core of the celestial objects, thermalize in a small core region, and eventually form tiny black holes via core collapse, resulting destruction of the host objects. We demonstrate that the existence of a variety of celestial objects provides stringent constraints on strongly-interacting heavy dark matter, a blind-spot for the terrestrial dark matter detectors as well as for the cosmological probes. Celestial objects with larger sizes and lower core temperatures, such as Jupiter, are the most optimal detectors to probe the strongly-interacting heavy non-annihilating dark matter.

v2: 11 pages, 2 figures. Results Unchanged. Matches version published in Physical Review D