Death and Serious Injury by Dark Matter

Understand

Macroscopic dark matter refers to a variety of dark matter candidates that would be expected to (elastically) scatter off of ordinary matter with a large geometric cross-section.

• A wide range of macro masses $M_X$ and cross-sections $\sigma_X$ remain unprobed.
• We show that over a wide region within the unexplored parameter space, collisions of a macro with a human body would result in serious injury or death.
• We use the absence of such unexplained impacts with a well-monitored subset of the human population to exclude a region bounded by $\sigma_X \geq 10^{-8} - 10^{-7}$ cm$^2$ and $M_X < 50$ kg.