Related papers: White Dwarfs as Dark Matter Detectors
Dark matter (DM) which sufficiently heats a local region in a white dwarf will trigger runaway fusion, igniting a type Ia supernova (SN). In a companion paper, this instability was used to constrain DM heavier than $10^{16}$ GeV which…
The transit of primordial black holes through a white dwarf causes localized heating around the trajectory of the black hole through dynamical friction. For sufficiently massive black holes, this heat can initiate runaway thermonuclear…
It was recently demonstrated that asymmetric dark matter can ignite supernovae by collecting and collapsing inside lone sub-Chandrasekhar mass white dwarfs, and that this may be the cause of Type Ia supernovae. A ball of asymmetric dark…
We investigate local environmental effects from dark matter (DM) on thermonuclear supernovae (SNe Ia) using publicly available archival data of 224 low-redshift events, in an attempt to shed light on the SN Ia progenitor systems. SNe Ia are…
White dwarfs, the most abundant stellar remnants, provide a promising means of probing dark matter (DM) interactions, complimentary to terrestrial searches. The scattering of dark matter from stellar constituents leads to gravitational…
In our galaxy, the white dwarfs (WDs) will inevitably capture the dark matter (DM) particles streaming through them, if there exist interactions between DM particles and nuclei/electrons. At the same time, these DM particles can also be…
We investigate whether nearby white dwarfs (WDs) can constrain dark matter (DM) interactions with ordinary matter. As experimental sensitivity improves, driven by the Gaia mission, the sample volume of nearby WDs has been increasing over…
Dark matter is believed to be a major component of our universe. In this paper we propose a new mechanism based on dark matter inspired super-Chandrasekhar mass white dwarf to explain the recent observation of super luminous type Ia…
Dark matter could have a dissipative asymmetric subcomponent in the form of atomic dark matter (aDM). This arises in many scenarios of dark complexity, and is a prediction of neutral naturalness, such as the Mirror Twin Higgs model. We show…
Recent studies of low redshift type Ia supernovae (SNIa) indicate that half explode from less than Chandrasekhar mass white dwarfs, implying ignition must proceed from something besides the canonical criticality of Chandrasekhar mass SNIa…
In the vast expanse of our galaxy, white dwarfs (WDs) are natural sentinels, capturing the enigmatic dark matter (DM) particles that incessantly traverse their interiors. These celestial bodies provide a unique vantage point for probing…
White dwarfs (WDs) are the most promising captors of dark matter (DM) particles in the crests that are expected to build up in the cores of dense stellar clusters. The DM particles could reach sufficient densities in WD cores to liberate…
White Dwarfs (WD) capture Dark Matter (DM) as they orbit within their host halos. These captured particles may subsequently annihilate, heating the stellar core and preventing the WD from cooling. The potential wells of WDs are considerably…
We show that a star orbiting close enough to an adiabatically grown supermassive black hole can capture a large number of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) during its lifetime. WIMP annihilation energy release in low- to…
Supernova explosions are among the most extreme events in the Universe, making them a promising environment in which to search for the effects of light, weakly coupled new particles. As significant sources of energy, they are known to have…
Recently, Cheng et al. identified a number of massive white dwarfs (WD) that appear to have an additional heat source providing a luminosity near $\approx 10^{-3}L_\odot$ for multiple Gyr. In this paper we explore heating from electron…
We propose a novel and feasible method to detect dark matter (DM) electron interaction via pulsating white dwarfs (WDs) in the central region of globular clusters. Annihilation of the DM particles captured by those WDs can provide…
We show that Milky Way white dwarfs are excellent targets for dark matter (DM) detection. Using Fermi and H.E.S.S. Galactic center gamma-ray data, we investigate sensitivity to DM annihilating within white dwarfs into long-lived or boosted…
We set up and perform collision rate simulations between dark matter in the form of asteroid-mass primordial black holes (PBHs) and white dwarf stars. These encounters trigger prompt detonations and could be the key to solving the ignition…
Type Ia supernovae are generally thought to be due to the thermonuclear explosions of carbon-oxygen white dwarfs with masses near the Chandrasekhar mass. This scenario, however, has two long-standing problems. First, the explosions do not…