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Related papers: Heavy Dark Matter in White Dwarfs: Multiple-Scatte…

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Brown dwarfs, being transitional objects between giant planets and low-mass stars, possess dense, cool interiors that provide optimal conditions to explore non-standard physics. Capture and accumulation of dark-matter particles can alter…

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics · Physics 2026-05-15 A. Pérez-Garrido

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…

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics · Physics 2020-11-04 C. J. Horowitz

Compact astrophysical objects, such as neutron stars and white dwarfs, can act as detectors of energetic particle fluxes originating from astrophysical accelerators. While most existing capture and heating calculations assume isotropic very…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2026-02-19 Jaime Hoefken Zink , Shihwen Hor , Maura E. Ramirez-Quezada

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…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2025-10-28 Pooja Bhattacharjee , Sandra Robles , Stephan A. Meighen-Berger , Francesca Calore

If dark matter is composed of new particles, these may become captured after scattering with nuclei in the Sun, thermalise through additional scattering, and finally annihilate into neutrinos that can be detected on Earth. If dark matter…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2019-05-09 Mattias Blennow , Stefan Clementz , Juan Herrero-Garcia

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…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2017-03-30 Jia-Shu Niu , Weikai Zong , Hui-Fang Xue

Thermal evolution of the central region of a $0.9 \, M_\odot$ C/O white dwarf at the initial stage of the ion mixture crystallization is studied by numerically solving the heat equation on a fine spatial and temporal grid and by including a…

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics · Physics 2024-10-18 D. A. Baiko

If captured by the gravitational field of stars or other compact objects, dark matter can self-annihilate and produce a potentially detectable particle flux. In the case of superheavy dark matter ($ m_{X} \gtrsim 10^{8} GeV $), a large…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2020-01-27 Cosmin Ilie , Saiyang Zhang

Dark matter that is capable of sufficiently heating a local region in a white dwarf will trigger runaway fusion and ignite a type Ia supernova. This was originally proposed in Graham et al. (2015) and used to constrain primordial black…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2019-01-02 Peter Graham , Ryan Janish , Vijay Narayan , Surjeet Rajendran , Paul Riggins

Dark matter in the form of weakly interacting massive particles is predicted to become gravitationally captured and accumulate in stars. While the subsequent annihilations of such particles lead to the injection of energy into stellar…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2014-11-20 Dan Hooper , Douglas Spolyar , Alberto Vallinotto , Nickolay Y. Gnedin

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…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2024-06-06 Jia-Shu Niu

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…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2021-06-25 David Curtin , Jack Setford

Dark matter particles will be captured in neutron stars if they undergo scattering interactions with nucleons or leptons. These collisions transfer the dark matter kinetic energy to the star, resulting in appreciable heating that is…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2019-07-02 Nicole F. Bell , Giorgio Busoni , Sandra Robles

Direct detection experiments have started to explore dark matter scattering off electrons and nucleons through light mediators. Mediators with sub-keV masses are efficiently produced in the Sun and can be absorbed in the same detectors that…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2026-02-27 Pieter Braat , Anh Vu Phan , Marieke Postma , Susanne Westhoff

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…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2024-06-05 Javier F. Acevedo , Rebecca K. Leane , Lillian Santos-Olmsted

Gravitational potential fluctuations driven by bursty star formation can kinematically 'heat up' dark matter at the centres of dwarf galaxies. A key prediction of such models is that, at a fixed dark matter halo mass, dwarfs with a higher…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2019-04-15 J. I. Read , M. G. Walker , P. Steger

A non negligible fraction of white dwarf stars show the presence of heavy elements in their atmospheres. The most accepted explanation for this contamination is the accretion of material coming from tidally disrupted planetesimals, which…

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics · Physics 2022-04-13 F. C. Wachlin , G. Vauclair , S. Vauclair , L. G. Althaus

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…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-05-23 I. V. Moskalenko , L. L. Wai

We investigate the effects of dark matter annihilation on objects with masses close to the sub-stellar limit, finding that the minimum mass for stable hydrogen burning is larger than the $\sim0.075 M_\odot $ value predicted in the Standard…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2025-09-09 Djuna Croon , Jeremy Sakstein , Juri Smirnov , Jack Streeter

It is well-known that stars have the potential to be excellent dark matter detectors. Infalling dark matter that scatters within stars could lead to a range of observational signatures, including stellar heating, black hole formation, and…

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology · Physics 2022-05-18 William DeRocco , Marios Galanis , Robert Lasenby