Earlier this week I went to a seminar. That’s a rare enough event these days given all the other things I have to do. The talk concerned was by Katie Mack, who was visiting the Astronomy Centre and it contained a nice review of the general situation regarding the constraints on astrophysical dark matter from direct and indirect detection experiments. I’m not an expert on experiments – I’m banned from most laboratories on safety grounds – so it was nice to get a review from someone who knows what they’re talking about.
One of the pieces of evidence discussed in the talk was something I’ve never really looked at in detail myself, namely the claimed evidence of an emission “line” in the spectrum of X-rays emitted by the hot gas in galaxy clusters. I put the word “line” in inverted commas for reasons which will soon become obvious. The primary reference for the claim is a paper by Bulbul et al which is, of course, freely available on the arXiv.
The key graph from that paper is this:
The claimed feature – it stretches the imagination considerably to call it a “line” – is shown in red. No, I’m not particularly impressed either, but this is what passes for high-quality data in X-ray astronomy!
There’s a nice review of this from about a year ago here which says this feature
is very significant, at 4-5 astrophysical sigma.
I’m not sure how to convert astrophysical sigma into actual sigma, but then I don’t really like sigma anyway. A proper Bayesian model comparison is really needed here. If it is a real feature then a plausible explanation is that it is produced by the decay of some sort of dark matter particle in a manner that involves the radiation of an energetic photon. An example is the decay of a massive sterile neutrino – a hypothetical particle that does not participate in weak interactions – into a lighter standard model neutrino and a photon, as discussed here. In this scenario the parent particle would have a mass of about 7keV so that the resulting photon has an energy of half that. Such a particle would constitute warm dark matter.
On the other hand, that all depends on you being convinced that there is anything there at all other than a combination of noise and systematics. I urge you to read the paper and decide. Then perhaps you can try to persuade me, because I’m not at all sure. The X-ray spectrum of hot gas does have a number of known emission features in it that needed to be subtracted before any anomalous emission can be isolated. I will remark however that there is a known recombination line of Argon that lies at 3.6 keV, and you have to be convinced that this has been subtracted correctly if the red bump is to be interpreted as something extra. Also note that all the spectra that show this feature are obtained using the same instrument – on the XMM/Newton spacecraft which makes it harder to eliminate the possibility that it is an instrumental artefact.
I’d be interested in comments from X-ray folk about how confident we should be that the 3.5 keV “anomaly” is real…
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This entry was posted on July 22, 2015 at 2:44 pm and is filed under Bad Statistics, The Universe and Stuff with tags dark matter, galaxy clusters, Katie Mack, neutrino, Particle Physics, Sterile neutrino, XMM/Newton. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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