Artigo Acesso aberto

WMAP haze: Directly observing dark matter?

2008; American Physical Society; Volume: 78; Issue: 8 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1103/physrevd.78.083505

ISSN

1550-7998

Autores

Michael McNeil Forbes, Ariel Zhitnitsky,

Tópico(s)

Superconducting and THz Device Technology

Resumo

In this paper, we show that dark matter in the form of dense matter/antimatter nuggets could provide a natural and unified explanation for several distinct bands of diffuse radiation from the core of the Galaxy spanning over 13 orders of magnitude in frequency. We fix all of the phenomenological properties of this model by matching to x-ray observations in the keV band, and then calculate the unambiguously predicted thermal emission in the microwave band, at frequencies smaller by 11 orders of magnitude. Remarkably, the intensity and spectrum of the emitted thermal radiation are consistent with---and could entirely explain---the so-called ``WMAP haze'': a diffuse microwave excess observed from the core of our Galaxy by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). This provides another strong constraint of our proposal, and a remarkable nontrivial validation. If correct, our proposal identifies the nature of the dark matter, explains baryogenesis, and provides a means to directly probe the matter distribution in our Galaxy by analyzing several different types of diffuse emissions.

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