Dark matter in the Solar System. III. The distribution function of WIMPs at the Earth from gravitational capture
- Creators
- Peter, Annika H. G.
Abstract
In this last paper in a series of three on weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) dark matter in the Solar System, we focus on WIMPs bound to the system by gravitationally scattering off of planets. We present simulations of WIMP orbits in a toy solar system consisting of only the Sun and Jupiter. As previous work suggested, we find that the density of gravitationally captured WIMPs at the Earth is small and largely insensitive to the details of elastic scattering in the Sun. However, we find that the density of gravitationally captured WIMPs may be affected by external Galactic gravitational fields. If such fields are unimportant, the density of gravitationally captured WIMPs at the Earth should be similar to the maximum density of WIMPs captured in the Solar System by elastic scattering in the Sun. Using standard assumptions about the halo WIMP distribution function, we find that the gravitationally captured WIMPs contribute negligibly to direct detection event rates. While these WIMPs do dominate the annihilation rate of WIMPs in the Earth, the resulting event rate in neutrino telescopes is too low to be observed in next-generation neutrino telescopes.
Additional Information
© 2009 The American Physical Society. Received 9 February 2009; published 28 May 2009. We thank Scott Tremaine for advising this project, and Aldo Serenelli and Carlos Penya-Garay for providing tables of isotope abundances in the Sun. We acknowledge financial support from NASA Grant Nos. NNG04GL47G and NNX08AH24G and from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The simulations were performed using computing resources at Princeton University supported by the Department of Astrophysical Sciences (NSF AST-0216105), the Department of Physics, and the TIGRESS High Performance Computing Center.Attached Files
Published - Peter2009p4422Phys_Rev_D.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 15480
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20090831-102648382
- NNG04GL47G
- NASA
- NNX08AH24G
- NASA
- Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation
- AST-0216105
- NSF
- Created
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2009-09-08Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-08Created from EPrint's last_modified field