Using Exoplanets as Dark Matter Detectors
martyb writes:
Using exoplanets as dark matter detectors:
In a new paper, two astrophysicists suggest dark matter could be detected by measuring the effect it has on the temperature of exoplanets, which are planets outside our solar system.
This could provide new insights into dark matter, the mysterious substance that can't be directly observed, but which makes up roughly 80% of the mass of the universe.
"We believe there should be about 300 billion exoplanets that are waiting to be discovered," said Juri Smirnov, a fellow at The Ohio State University's Center for Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
"Even finding and studying a small number of them could give us a great deal of information about dark matter that we don't know now."
Smirnov co-authored the paper with Rebecca Leane, a postdoctoral researcher at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University.
[...] Smirnov said that when the gravity of exoplanets captures dark matter, the dark matter travels to the planetary core where it "annihilates" and releases its energy as heat. The more dark matter that is captured, the more it should heat up the exoplanet.
This heating could be measured by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, an infrared telescope scheduled to launch in October that will be able to measure the temperature of distant exoplanets.
"If exoplanets have this anomalous heating associated with dark matter, we should be able to pick it up," Smirnov said.
Journal Reference:
Rebecca K. Leane, Juri Smirnov. Exoplanets as Sub-GeV Dark Matter Detectors [open], Physical Review Letters (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.161101)
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