Celestial Probes of Dark Matter in the Galactic Center

Synopsis

Celestial bodies serve as large scattering targets for dark matter, offering complementary sensitivity to direct and indirect searches via their potential heating and annihilation signatures. Most existing studies have focused on such effects on nearby stars and planets. By contrast, there has been less focus on the galactic center, where both stellar and dark matter densities are orders of magnitude higher than anywhere else in the Milky Way. I will show that, despite its distance, the innermost parsec of our Galaxy provides a unique laboratory for probing dark matter interactions beyond current experimental limits.