English

Reticulum II: Particle Dark Matter and Primordial Black Holes Limits

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2022-01-26 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Abstract

Reticulum II (Ret II) is a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way and presents a prime target to investigate the nature of dark matter (DM) because of its high mass-to-light ratio. We evaluate a dedicated INTEGRAL observation campaign data set to obtain γ\gamma-ray fluxes from Ret II and compare those with expectations from DM. Ret II is not detected in the γ\gamma-ray band 25--8000 keV, and we derive a flux limit of 108ergcm2s1\lesssim 10^{-8}\,\mathrm{erg\,cm^{-2}\,s^{-1}}. The previously reported 511 keV line is not seen, and we find a flux limit of 1.7×104phcm2s1\lesssim 1.7 \times 10^{-4}\,\mathrm{ph\,cm^{-2}\,s^{-1}}. We construct spectral models for primordial black hole (PBH) evaporation and annihilation/decay of particle DM, and subsequent annihilation of positrons produced in these processes. We exclude that the totality of DM in Ret II is made of a monochromatic distribution of PBHs of masses 8×1015g\lesssim 8 \times 10^{15}\,\mathrm{g}. Our limits on the velocity-averaged DM annihilation cross section into e+ee^+e^- are σv5×1028(mDM/MeV)2.5cm3s1\langle \sigma v \rangle \lesssim 5 \times 10^{-28} \left(m_{\rm DM} / \mathrm{MeV} \right)^{2.5}\,\mathrm{cm^3\,s^{-1}}. We conclude that analysing isolated targets in the MeV γ\gamma-ray band can set strong bounds on DM properties without multi-year data sets of the entire Milky Way, and encourage follow-up observations of Ret II and other dwarf galaxies.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2109.03791,
  title  = {Reticulum II: Particle Dark Matter and Primordial Black Holes Limits},
  author = {Thomas Siegert and Celine Boehm and Francesca Calore and Roland Diehl and Martin G. H. Krause and Pasquale D. Serpico and Aaron C. Vincent},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.03791},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

8 pages, 10 figures, submitted