Searching for Dark Clumps with Gravitational-Wave Detectors

Understand

Dark compact objects ("clumps") transiting the Solar System exert accelerations on the test masses (TM) in a gravitational-wave (GW) detector.

• We reexamine the detectability of these clump transits in a variety of current and future GW detectors, operating over a broad range of frequencies.
• TM accelerations induced by clump transits through the inner Solar System have frequency content around $f \sim \mu$Hz.
• Some of us [arXiv:2112.11431] recently proposed a GW detection concept with $\mu$Hz sensitivity, based on asteroid-to-asteroid ranging.