SciPost Astronomy Core

SciPost Astronomy Core Vol. 1 issue 1 (May - December 2021)

• Technical comment on the paper of Dessert et al. "The dark matter interpretation of the 3.5 keV line is inconsistent with blank-sky observations"

  Alexey Boyarsky, Denys Malyshev, Oleg Ruchayskiy, Denys Savchenko

  SciPost Astro. Core 1, 001 (2021) · published 4 May 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

  An unidentified line at energy around 3.5 keV was detected in the spectra of dark matter-dominated objects. Recent work of Dessert et al. [1812.06976] used 30 Msec of XMM-Newton blank-sky observations to constrain the admissible line flux, challenging its dark matter decay origin. We demonstrate that these bounds are overestimated by more than an order of magnitude due to improper background modeling. Therefore the dark matter interpretation of the 3.5 keV signal remains viable.