A recent analysis of pulsar timing data has reported evidence for a massive (∼6×107M⊙) dark matter subhalo located only ∼0.8 kpc from Earth. This candidate implies an exceptionally large J-factor of ∼1023GeV2cm−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-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 bbˉ and τ+τ− channels. Despite this conservative treatment, the resulting limits remain stringent due to the exceptionally large J-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.
@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}
}