English

Constraints on dark matter annihilation from a nearby subhalo candidate

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2025-12-16 v1 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

A recent analysis of pulsar timing data has reported evidence for a massive (6×107M\sim 6 \times 10^7 M_{\odot}) dark matter subhalo located only 0.8\sim 0.8 kpc from Earth. This candidate implies an exceptionally large JJ-factor of 1023GeV2cm5\sim 10^{23}\,{\rm GeV^2\,cm^{-5}}, exceeding that of known classical dwarf spheroidal galaxies by orders of magnitude and rivaling the Galactic Center. In this work, we utilize more than 17 years of Fermi\textit{Fermi}-LAT data to search for gamma-ray emission from this subhalo. We identify a tentative excess in the region with ambiguous origin. Adopting a conservative strategy, we retain this excess without modeling additional astrophysical components, treating it instead as unmodeled background to derive upper limits on the dark matter annihilation cross-section for the bbˉb\bar{b} and τ+τ\tau^+\tau^- channels. Despite this conservative treatment, the resulting limits remain stringent due to the exceptionally large JJ-factor. Subject to the dynamical confirmation of the subhalo, these constraints are potentially orders of magnitude stronger than those obtained from combined analyses of dwarf spheroidal galaxies and blind subhalo searches.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.13261,
  title  = {Constraints on dark matter annihilation from a nearby subhalo candidate},
  author = {Ben-Yang Zhu and Yun-Feng Liang and Xiaoyuan Huang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.13261},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

7 pages, 2figures