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RE: Rising the Earth's temperature... with dark matter

in #steemstem5 years ago

Thanks for passing by. This is a very interesting comment and this means I should clarify a few things.

First, dark matter is assumed to interact with normal matter. This implies that:

  1. we can pair-produce dark matter from normal matter
  2. dark matter pairs can annihilate into normal matter
    This is the sum of these two processes that actually dictates the amount of dark matter that is left over today. At present time, dark matter is too diluted and the universe is too cold to have any of these two processes in action.

Let’s now go closer to the topic. Dark matter annihilation consists in the process number 2. For this process to happen, we thus need a pair of dark matter particles, which is not realised at present time except if the dark matter density locally increases by one way or the other.

Earth capturing dark matter concretises this increase in density, so that dark matter annihilation can take place: two dark matter particles can meet each other and produce normal matter. This normal matter contributes to the heat flow originating from the planet.

The Earth heat flow is however measured. We have a result, that comes with an error bar. Therefore, we must make sure that the dark matter component to the heat flow fits within the error bar. This allows us to constrain specific classes of dark matter setups (but not all of them). The interesting point is that this constrains models that were allowed by data so far. Thanks to this “Earth heat flow” technique, those models are now excluded.

is this clearer? If not, please do not hesitate to ask for more clarifications.

If it were to be true then we would be fucked either way I guess, since there's no way to prevent that from happening - wouldn't that be great news for the politicians lol.

This is happening no matter what (once we agreed on the theoretical dark matter model to put in). The model is however such that dark matter does not generate any extra heating: the dark matter contribution has to fit within the observed heating.

Consequently, this won’t change anything for the climate. Actually, this post has nothing to do with climate change (I have just found it funny to correlate them. I know, my sense of humour sucks… ;) ).

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