Dark Matter and Suspiciously Warm Planets:

[beecee]

https://www.wired.com/story/wheres-the-dark-matter-look-for-suspiciously-warm-planets/

Physicists calculated that these mysterious particles will betray their location with heat. To prove it, they’ll need the most powerful telescopes in the cosmos.

Soon we'll have a cutting-edge thermometer: NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope is expected to launch this fall.PHOTOGRAPH: DAVID HIGGINBOTHAM/NASA/MSFC

WE'RE BATHING IN an uncertain universe. Astrophysicists generally accept that about 85 percent of all mass in the universe comes from exotic, still-hypothetical particles called dark matter. Our Milky Way galaxy, which appears as a bright flat disk, lives in a humongous sphere of the stuff—a halo, which gets especially dense toward the center. But dark matter’s very nature dictates that it's elusive. It doesn’t interact with electromagnetic forces like light, and any potential clashes with matter are rare and hard to spot.

extract:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           For that reason, Leane is suggesting that we look for them in the Milky Way’s vast collection of exoplanets, or those outside our solar system. Specifically, she thinks we should be using large sets of gas giants, planets like our own Jupiter. Dark matter can get stuck in planets’ gravities, as if in quicksand. When that happens, particles can collide and annihilate, releasing heat. That heat can accumulate to make the planet piping hot—especially those near a galaxy’s dense center

more at link..........................

the paper:

https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.161101

Exoplanets as Sub-GeV Dark Matter Detectors:

ABSTRACT:

We present exoplanets as new targets to discover dark matter (DM). Throughout the Milky Way, DM can scatter, become captured, deposit annihilation energy, and increase the heat flow within exoplanets. We estimate upcoming infrared telescope sensitivity to this scenario, finding actionable discovery or exclusion searches. We find that DM with masses above about an MeV can be probed with exoplanets, with DM-proton and DM-electron scattering cross sections down to about 10−37  cm2, stronger than existing limits by up to six orders of magnitude. Supporting evidence of a DM origin can be identified through DM-induced exoplanet heating correlated with galactic position, and hence DM density. This provides new motivation to measure the temperature of the billions of brown dwarfs, rogue planets, and gas giants peppered throughout our Galaxy.

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Question: So why just exoplanets? Why not some of our own gaseous giants? Isn't there current debate about Jupiter's heat source? And how hard and by what method can they determine it to be possibly caused by DM particles?

Edited May 4, 2021 by beecee

[beecee]

11 hours ago, beecee said:

Question: So why just exoplanets? Why not some of our own gaseous giants? Isn't there current debate about Jupiter's heat source? And how hard and by what method can they determine it to be possibly caused by DM particles?

I would assume that as per the article, "Dark matter can get stuck in planets’ gravities, as if in quicksand" could also possibly apply to our own gas giants then?