Tuesday, 23 June 2015

Is there Dark Matter inside the Earth?

Yes, there should be dark matter within the Earth, but at very low densities - a few $10^{-22}$ kg/m$^3$ (Bovy & Tremaine 2012), something like one hundredth of the density of the interplanetary medium. The whole of the Earth would contain few hundred grammes!



Of course, this density averaged over a sphere a lot larger than the Galaxy adds up to a lot of mass, but unlike luminous matter, dark matter should not be particularly concentrated in the plane of the Galaxy (and observations of the dynamics of local stars confirm this).



Neither do we expect dark matter to be especially concentrated within the Earth. Although it does interact gravitationally, the kinetic energy it receives from falling in to the Earth's gravitational potential will be exactly sufficient for it to escape again, unless it suffers some inelastic interaction inside the Earth. Some researchers do think that it may be possible that weak interactions may trap dark matter in the core of the Sun (e.g. Vincent et al. 2015) or even more likely, in neutron stars (Guver et al. 2012). But the Earth is not large or dense enough for this to be a likely scenario.

No comments:

Post a Comment