Axions and other putative feebly interacting particles (FIPs) with a mass of tens to several hundreds of keVs can be produced in stellar cores with a Lorentz boost factor Ea/ma≲10. Thus, starburst galaxies such as M82 are efficient factories of slow axions. Their decay a→γγ would produce a large flux of X-ray photons, peaking around 100 keV and spread around the galaxy by an angle that can be relatively large. We use observations of the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) mission to show that the absence of these features can constrain 30−500 keV axion masses into uncharted regions for axion-photon coupling of gaγ∼10−10−10−12GeV−1. Our argument can be applied to other heavy FIPs and astrophysical sources that are hot enough to produce them, yet cold enough to avoid large boost factors which slow down the decay.
@article{arxiv.2412.03660,
title = {NuSTAR bounds on radiatively decaying particles from M82},
author = {Francisco R. Candón and Damiano F. G. Fiorillo and Giuseppe Lucente and Edoardo Vitagliano and Julia K. Vogel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.03660},
year = {2025}
}