English

Was There a 3.5 keV Line?

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2023-09-08 v1 High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

The 3.5 keV line is a purported emission line observed in galaxies, galaxy clusters, and the Milky Way whose origin is inconsistent with known atomic transitions and has previously been suggested to arise from dark matter decay. We systematically re-examine the bulk of the evidence for the 3.5 keV line, attempting to reproduce six previous analyses that found evidence for the line. Surprisingly, we only reproduce one of the analyses; in the other five we find no significant evidence for a 3.5 keV line when following the described analysis procedures on the original data sets. For example, previous results claimed 4σ\sigma evidence for a 3.5 keV line from the Perseus cluster; we dispute this claim, finding no evidence for a 3.5 keV line. We find evidence for background mismodeling in multiple analyses. We show that analyzing these data in narrower energy windows diminishes the effects of mismodeling but returns no evidence for a 3.5 keV line. We conclude that there is little robust evidence for the existence of the 3.5 keV line. Some of the discrepancy of our results from those of the original works may be due to the earlier reliance on local optimizers, which we demonstrate can lead to incorrect results. For ease of reproducibility, all code and data are publicly available.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2309.03254,
  title  = {Was There a 3.5 keV Line?},
  author = {Christopher Dessert and Joshua W. Foster and Yujin Park and Benjamin R. Safdi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.03254},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

35 pages, 23 figures, Supplementary Code at https://github.com/joshwfoster/3p5, Video Abstract at https://youtu.be/0Ad_v5jxmj8

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:14:37.538Z