Main sequence stars with asymmetric dark matter

Stellar Shocks from Dark Matter Asteroid Impacts

Macroscopic dark matter is almost unconstrained over a wide "asteroidlike" mass range, where it could scatter on baryonic matter with geometric cross section. We show that when such an object travels through a star, it produces shock waves that reach the stellar surface, leading to a distinctive transient optical, UV, and x-ray emission. This signature can be searched for on a variety of stellar types and locations. In a dense globular cluster, such events occur far more often than flare backgrounds, and an existing UV telescope could probe orders of magnitude in dark matter mass in one week of dedicated observation.

Exoplanets as Sub-GeV Dark Matter Detectors

We present exoplanets as new targets to discover dark matter (DM). Throughout the Milky Way, DM can scatter, become captured, deposit annihilation energy, and increase the heat flow within exoplanets. We estimate upcoming infrared telescope sensitivity to this scenario, finding actionable discovery or exclusion searches. We find that DM with masses above about an MeV can be probed with exoplanets, with DM-proton and DM-electron scattering cross sections down to about 10^{-37}  cm^{2}, stronger than existing limits by up to six orders of magnitude. Supporting evidence of a DM origin can be identified through DM-induced exoplanet heating correlated with galactic position, and hence DM density. This provides new motivation to measure the temperature of the billions of brown dwarfs, rogue planets, and gas giants peppered throughout our Galaxy.

Dark Matter Ignition of Type Ia Supernovae

Recent studies of low redshift type Ia supernovae (SN Ia) indicate that half explode from less than Chandrasekhar mass white dwarfs, implying ignition must proceed from something besides the canonical criticality of Chandrasekhar mass SN Ia progenitors. We show that 1-100 PeV mass asymmetric dark matter, with imminently detectable nucleon scattering interactions, can accumulate to the point of self-gravitation in a white dwarf and collapse, shedding gravitational potential energy by scattering off nuclei, thereby heating the white dwarf and igniting the flame front that precedes SN Ia. We combine data on SN Ia masses with data on the ages of SN Ia-adjacent stars. This combination reveals a 2.8σ inverse correlation between SN Ia masses and ignition ages, which could result from increased capture of dark matter in 1.4 vs 1.1 solar mass white dwarfs. Future studies of SN Ia in galactic centers will provide additional tests of dark-matter-induced type Ia ignition. Remarkably, both bosonic and fermionic SN Ia-igniting dark matter also resolve the missing pulsar problem by forming black holes in ≳10  Myr old pulsars at the center of the Milky Way.

Possible indication of momentum-dependent asymmetric dark matter in the sun

Broad disagreement persists between helioseismological observables and predictions of solar models computed with the latest surface abundances. Here we show that most of these problems can be solved by the presence of asymmetric dark matter coupling to nucleons as the square of the momentum q exchanged in the collision. We compute neutrino fluxes, small frequency separations, surface helium abundances, sound speed profiles, and convective zone depths for a number of models, showing more than a 6σ preference for q^{2} models over others, and over the standard solar model. The preferred mass (3 GeV) and reference dark matter-nucleon cross section (10^{-37}  cm^{2} at q_{0}=40  MeV) are within the region of parameter space allowed by both direct detection and collider searches.