Solar Wakes of Dark Matter Flows

Abstract

We analyze the effect of the Sun's gravitational field on a flow of cold dark matter (CDM) through the solar system in the limit where the velocity dispersion of the flow vanishes. The exact density and velocity distributions are derived in the case where the Sun is a point mass. The results are extended to the more realistic case where the Sun has a finite size spherically symmetric mass distribution. We find that regions of infinite density, called caustics, appear. One such region is a line caustic on the axis of symmetry, downstream from the Sun, where the flow trajectories cross. Another is a cone-shaped caustic surface near the trajectories of maximum scattering angle. The trajectories forming the conical caustic pass through the Sun's interior and probe the solar mass distribution, raising the possibility that the solar mass distribution may some day be measured by a dark matter detector on Earth. We generalize our results to the case of flows with continuous velocity distributions, such as that predicted by the isothermal model of the Milky Way halo.

30 pages, 8 figures

References in corpus (6)

• WIMP Annual Modulation with Opposite Phase in Late-Infall Halo Models
• First Results of the EDELWEISS WIMP Search using a 320 g Heat-and-Ionization Ge Detector
• Evidence for Ring Caustics in the Milky Way
• Signatures of Hierarchical Clustering in Dark Matter Detection Experiments
• Searching for Supersymmetric Dark Matter - The Directional Rate and the Modulation Effect Due to Caustic Rings
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