Dark matter in the solar system III: The distribution function of WIMPs at the Earth from gravitational capture

Understand

In this last paper in a series of three on weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) dark matter in the solar system, we focus on WIMPs bound to the system by gravitationally scattering off of planets.

• We present simulations of WIMP orbits in a toy solar system consisting of only the Sun and Jupiter.
• As previous work suggested, we find that the density of gravitationally captured WIMPs at the Earth is small and largely insensitive to the details of elastic scattering in the Sun.
• However, we find that the density of gravitationally captured WIMPs may be affected by external Galactic gravitational fields.