Abstract

Contributed Talk - Splinter JungeAG

Tuesday, 12 September 2023, 15:00   (H 3007)

Dark matter decay feature search toward the galactic bulge and halo

Katharina Egg
Dr. Karl Remeis-Sternwarte, ECAP, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg

The nature of dark matter remains one of the big questions of modern physics and astrophysics. A popular option for dark matter candidates are sterile neutrinos, which are proposed to exist in many extensions of the standard model. This idea gained further attention in 2014, when Bulbul et al. detected an otherwise unassociated decay line at 3.5 keV that was theorized to have been caused by sterile neutrino decays. In the light of both detections and non-detections the status of this feature, however, remains uncertain. eROSITA data now provides a new and unique opportunity to examine the large scale galactic X-ray background for otherwise unassociated decay features that could be connected to sterile neutrino decays. The spectra of the eROSITA X-ray background were modelled and their residuals were scanned for line features. The results will be presented in this talk.