English

Complementary Planetary Spectroscopy Probes of Dark Matter

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2025-08-05 v1 Earth and Planetary Astrophysics High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena

Abstract

We investigate dark matter (DM) interactions via spectroscopic signatures of energy injection in planetary environments. We develop a general framework to account for how DM energy injection signals depend on the DM spatial distribution, planetary structure, and DM energy deposition profile. We combine UV airglow data on the Solar System's gas giants from the Voyager and New Horizons flybys, and ionospheric measurements from AMS-02 and ELFIN CubeSat on Earth, with internal heat flow data from Cassini, Voyager, and terrestrial boreholes, to constrain DM-nucleon scattering across both heavy and light mediator scenarios. We show that Earth, gas giants, and ice giants probe complementary DM masses and mediator properties, and forecast the reach of a free-floating Super-Jupiter. These results establish planetary spectroscopy as a powerful and versatile probe of the dark sector, complementary to direct detection, cosmology, and collider searches.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.00980,
  title  = {Complementary Planetary Spectroscopy Probes of Dark Matter},
  author = {Carlos Blanco and Rebecca K. Leane and Marianne Moore and Joshua Tong},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.00980},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

26 pages, 13 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T04:30:07.181Z