Massive 'dark matter nuggets' the size of dust grains may be trapped inside the Earth, emitting detectable particle streams.
April 1, 2026
Original Paper
A New Way to Detect Axions from $\rm{A\bar{Q}Ns}$ Captured in the Earth
arXiv · 2603.29904
The Takeaway
Instead of individual invisible particles, this theory suggests dark matter can form dense clumps with the mass of a paperclip. If these 'nuggets' are trapped in Earth's core, they would act like tiny, eternal reactors that we can detect using existing neutrino telescopes.
From the abstract
Macroscopic dark matter with dominating strong interactions, supposed to be composites, represents an alternative to the most popular WIMP particles. Predicted in various models as strangelets, nuclearites, nuggets, having different internal structures and properties, but not yet observed experimentally, these forms of dark matter are associated with the existence of a large number of still unexplained observations. Nuggets, initially predicted by Witten, were reconsidered from the point of view