Dark matter, destroyer of worlds: neutrino, thermal, and existential signatures from black holes in the Sun and Earth

Abstract

Dark matter can be captured by celestial objects and accumulate at their centers, forming a core of dark matter that can collapse to a small black hole, provided that the annihilation rate is small or zero. If the nascent black hole is big enough, it will grow to consume the star or planet. We calculate the rate of dark matter accumulation in the Sun and Earth, and use their continued existence to place novel constraints on high mass asymmetric dark matter interactions. We also identify and detail less destructive signatures: a newly-formed black hole can be small enough to evaporate via Hawking radiation, resulting in an anomalous heat flow emanating from Earth, or in a flux of high-energy neutrinos from the Sun observable at IceCube. The latter signature is entirely new, and we find that it may cover large regions of parameter space that are not probed by any other method.

Astroparticle Physics with Compact Objects

“…Assuming the NS lifetime of 1 Gyr Equation (11) implies the total accumulated amount of 8 × 10 42 GeV in the conditions typical for the Milky Way, regardless of the DM mass. Dividing by the mass and requiring that the resulting number is larger than that of Equation (21), one finds the condition m 10 7 GeV, (23) in agreement with the results of Ref. [28].…”

“…A detailed analysis of these subtleties and further discussion can be found in Ref. [21][22][23]. Note that the estimates presented above neglect the self-interactions of DM particles.…”

“…The constraints on the DM from the kinetic heating have been worked out in detail in Refs. [21,[38][39][40][41].…”

“…Consider first the case of free fermions. In this case, the number of DM particles required to make a BH is given by Equation (21). Let us compare it to the number that can be accumulated according to Equation (11).…”

Physics Beyond the Standard Model with BlackHawk v2.0

“…The previous version of the manual can be found on the arXiv [34] (v2), while the code is publicly available on HEPForge: https://blackhawk.hepforge.org/ The code has been recently presented to the TOOLS 2020 conference [35]. BlackHawk is used by many groups from very different domains of astrophysics and cosmology to perform striking studies including, to the knowledge of the authors, evolution of BHs spin [36], EGRB constraints with extended mass distributions and spinning BHs [37] or with higher dimensional Schwarzschild BHs [38], electron and positrons signals from the galaxy with the 511 keV line [39,40], current [41] or prospective [42] X-ray limits, neutrino constraints from Super-Kamiokande [40], JUNO [43] or prospective neutrino detectors [44,45], gamma ray constraints from INTEGRAL [46], COMPTEL with improved lowenergy secondary particles treatment [12], prospective AMEGO instrument [12,47], LHASSO [48] or fine modelisation of the Galaxy [49], prediction of signals from Planet 9 within the PBH hypothesis [50], archival galactic center radio observations [51], interstellar medium temperature in dwarf galaxies [52][53][54] or 21 cm measurements by EDGES with Schwarzschild [55] or Kerr PBHs [56], Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) [57], heat flow from a small BH captured in the Earth core [58], warm DM from light Schwarzschild [22] and Kerr [23] PBHs, dark radiation from light spinning PBHs [23,24], (extended) dark sector emission [13,59], axion-like particle emission [60], HR from extended BH metrics…”