The dark matter interpretation of the 3.5-keV line is inconsistent with blank-sky observations

Abstract

Observations of nearby galaxies and galaxy clusters have reported an unexpected X-ray emission line around 3.5 kilo-electron volts (keV). Proposals to explain this line include decaying dark matter$-$in particular, that the decay of sterile neutrinos with a mass around 7 keV could match the available data. If this interpretation is correct, the 3.5 keV line should also be emitted by dark matter in the halo of the Milky Way. We used more than 30 megaseconds of XMM-Newton (X-ray Multi-Mirror Mission) blank-sky observations to test this hypothesis, finding no evidence of the 3.5-keV line emission from the Milky Way halo. We set an upper limit on the decay rate of dark matter in this mass range, which is inconsistent with the possibility that the 3.5-keV line originates from dark matter decay.

Comments: v1, 6+13 pages, 3 + 11 figures; v3, updated to version published in Science. Supplementary data at https://github.com/nickrodd/XMM-DM and supplementary analysis examples at https://github.com/bsafdi/BlankSkyfor3p5