How to search for Mirror Stars with Gaia

Understand

We show for the first time how to conduct a direct search for dark matter using Gaia observations.

• Its public astrometric data may contain the signals of mirror stars, exotic compact objects made of atomic dark matter with a tiny kinetic mixing between the dark and SM photon.
• Mirror stars capture small amounts of interstellar material in their cores, leading to characteristic optical/IR and X-ray emissions.
• We develop the detailed pipeline for conducting a mirror star search using data from Gaia and other stellar catalogues, and demonstrate our methodology by conducting a search for toy mirror stars with a simplified calculation of their optical/IR emissions over a wide range of mirror star and hidden sector parameters.