Is the radio emission in the Bullet cluster due to Dark Matter annihilation?

TL;DR

This study investigates whether dark matter annihilation can explain the radio emission in the Bullet cluster, analyzing multi-wavelength data and modeling different regions to identify potential dark matter contributions.

Contribution

The paper presents a detailed multi-region analysis of the Bullet cluster's radio halo, exploring dark matter annihilation as a source of emission and highlighting the complexities involved.

Findings

Dark matter annihilation can produce some of the observed radio emission.

Challenges remain in explaining high-frequency flux and the absence of emission from minor subhalos.

Radio emission from baryonic and dark matter subhalos shows different origins, with SZ data favoring primary electrons in the main subcluster.

Abstract

We study the complex structure of the Bullet cluster radio halo to determine the Dark Matter (DM) contribution to the emission observed in the different subhalos corresponding to the DM and baryonic dominated regions. We use different non-thermal models to study the different regions, and we compare our results with the available observations in the radio, X-ray and gamma-ray bands, and the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect data. We find that the radio emission coming from the main DM subhalo can be produced by secondary electrons produced by DM annihilations. In this scenario there are however some open issues, like the difficulty to explain the observed flux at 8.8 GHz, the high value of the required annihilation cross section, and the lack of observed emission coming from the minor DM subhalo. We also find that part of the radio emission originated by DM annihilation could be associated with a slightly extended radio source present near the main DM subhalo. Regarding the baryonic subhalos, the radio measurements do not allow to discriminate between a primary or secondary origin of the electrons, while the SZ effect data point towards a primary origin for the non-thermal electrons in the Main Subcluster. We conclude that in order to better constrain the properties of the DM subhalos, it is important to perform detailed measurements of the radio emission in the regions where the DM halos have their peaks, and that the separation of the complex radio halo in different subhalos is a promising technique to understand the properties of each specific subhalo.