Detecting Axion Stars with Radio Telescopes
Yang Bai, Yuta Hamada

TL;DR
This paper estimates the radio signals produced when axion stars interact with neutron stars, suggesting current and future radio telescopes could detect these events and help identify axion stars as dark matter components.
Contribution
It provides a detailed calculation of the electromagnetic radiation power from axion star-neutron star encounters, including interference and medium effects, and assesses detectability with existing telescopes.
Findings
Radiation power can reach 10^{11} W for dense axion stars.
Transient radio signals of about 0.1 seconds may be detectable within our galaxy.
Current and upcoming radio telescopes have high potential to discover dense axion stars.
Abstract
When axion stars fly through an astrophysical magnetic background, the axion-to-photon conversion may generate a large electromagnetic radiation power. After including the interference effects of the spacially-extended axion-star source and the macroscopic medium effects, we estimate the radiation power when an axion star meets a neutron star. For a dense axion star with , the radiated power is at the order of with as the axion particle mass and the strength of the neutron star magnetic field. For axion stars occupy a large fraction of dark matter energy density, this encounter event with a transient radio signal may happen in our galaxy with the averaged source distance of one kiloparsec. The predicted spectral flux density is at the order of Jy…
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