Dark Fires in the Sky: Compact Stars as Dark Matter Calorimeters

Dark matter is an invisible, ubiquitous substance that makes up four-fifths of all matter, yet its identity has remained a mystery despite heroic efforts to pinpoint it. One multi-faceted laboratory to study it is compact stars. Exploiting their exceptional properties such as ultra-high densities, deep fermion degeneracies, low temperatures, nucleon superfluidity, and strong magnetic fields, I will discuss numerous scenarios of dark matter that overheat -- or sometimes explode -- neutron stars and white dwarfs. The heating could be observed in the currently operational James Webb Space Telescope and an array of imminent observatories in the infrared optical, ultraviolet and x-ray. If undertaken by astronomers, these campaigns will constitute some of the most extensive searches for dark matter and new fundamental physics.

References:

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.14435