On the interpretation of dark matter self-interactions in Abell 3827

Abstract

Self-interactions of dark matter particles can potentially lead to an observable separation between the dark matter halo and the stars of a galaxy moving through a region of large dark matter density. Such a separation has recently been observed in a galaxy falling into the core of the galaxy cluster Abell 3827. We estimated the DM self-interaction cross section needed to reproduce the observed effects and find that the sensitivity of Abell 3827 has been significantly overestimated in a previous study. Our corrected estimate is $\tilde{\sigma }/m_{\text{DM}}\sim 3{\text{cm}}^2{\text{g}}^{-1}$ when self-interactions result in an effective drag force and $\sigma /m_{\text{DM}}\sim 1.5{\text{cm}}^2{\text{g}}^{-1}$ for the case of contact interactions, in some tension with previous upper bounds.

Comments: 5 pages, 3 figures; v2: matches published version