Wide Binary Evaporation by Dark Solitons: Implications from the GAIA Catalog

TL;DR

This paper proposes that dark matter solitons can cause evaporation of wide binary stars in the Milky Way, and uses GAIA data to identify candidates that can test the presence of such solitons, especially in the axion-like boson star mass range.

Contribution

It provides an analytic framework for binary star evaporation due to dark matter solitons and identifies candidate binaries in GAIA data to probe dark matter properties.

Findings

Identification of high-probability wide binaries in GAIA EDR3 with separations >0.1 parsec.

Potential to constrain axion-like boson star masses in the range 10^{-17} to 10^{-15} eV.

Survival of distant binaries can serve as a gravitational probe of dark matter solitons.

Abstract

An analytic calculation is given for binary star evaporation under the tidal perturbation from randomly distributed, spatially extended dark objects. In particular, the Milky Way's wide binary star population is susceptible to such disruption from dark matter solitons of comparable and larger sizes. We identify high-probability `halo-like' wide binaries in GAIA EDR3 with separations larger than 0.1 parsec. Survival of the farthest-separated candidates will provide a novel gravitational probe to dark matter in the form of solitons. In the case of dilute axion-like boson stars, the observational sensitivity extends into the axion mass range $m_a \sim 10^{-17}-10^{-15}$ eV.