Technical comment on the paper of Dessert et al. "The dark matter interpretation of the 3.5 keV line is inconsistent with blank-sky observations"

14 Apr 2020  ·  Alexey Boyarsky, Denys Malyshev, Oleg Ruchayskiy, Denys Savchenko ·

An unidentified line at energy around 3.5 keV was detected in the spectra of dark matter-dominated objects. Recent work of Dessert et al. [1812.06976] used 30 Msec of XMM-Newton blank-sky observations to constrain the admissible line flux, challenging its dark matter decay origin. We demonstrate that these bounds are overestimated by more than an order of magnitude due to improper background modeling. Therefore the dark matter interpretation of the 3.5 keV signal remains viable.

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Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena High Energy Physics - Phenomenology