| Abstract : | Old Neutron Stars, NS (∼Giga years or more) are relatively cold and compact astrophysical objects with strong gravitational fields with extremely low temperatures (≲1000 K). However, as they traversed through the dark matter (DM) halo, they capture DM particles through elastic scattering, increasing their surface temperature. As temperatures rise beyond 1000 K, they will be in the detectable range of infrared telescopes like the recently launched James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) etc. NS being complex objects, one would expect that the capture rate would depend on a host of nuclear physics and astrophysical quantities like the equation of state, NSs and DM velocities, etc., which have large uncertainties. Our analysis shows that the rise in temperature of the NS is dependent on the mass and cross-section of the DM particle. Thus, the measurements of the temperature of NS by JWST and other large telescopes would directly probe the particle nature of DM. |
