Stellar Shocks From Dark Matter Asteroid Impacts

TL;DR

This paper proposes that dark matter asteroid impacts on stars produce shock waves resulting in observable transient emissions, offering a new method to detect and constrain dark matter properties.

Contribution

It introduces a novel observational signature of macroscopic dark matter impacts on stars and assesses the detectability with current UV telescopes.

Findings

Impacts produce shock waves detectable as transient optical, UV, and X-ray signals.

Dense stellar environments increase impact event rates, enhancing detection prospects.

Existing UV telescopes can probe significant dark matter mass ranges within short observation periods.

Abstract

Macroscopic dark matter is almost unconstrained over a wide "asteroid-like" 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 which 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.