Abstract
SCIAMA has argued1–4 that the dark matter associated with galaxies, clusters of galaxies and the intergalactic medium consists of τ neutrinos of rest mass 28–30 eV, whose decay generates ultraviolet photons of energy ∼mv/2≈14–15 eV. We have carried out a test of this hypothesis using the Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope, which was flown aboard the space shuttle Columbia as part of the Astro-1 mission in December 1990. A straightforward application of Sciama's model predicts that we should have observed, from the rich galaxy cluster Abell 665, a spectral line from neutrino decay photons with a signal-to-noise ratio of ∼30. We detected no such emission. For neutrinos (or any similar dark matter particle) in the mass range 27.2–32.1 eV, our observations set a lower lifetime limit significantly greater than Sciama's model requires.
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Davidsen, A., Kriss, G., Ferguson, H. et al. Test of the decaying dark matter hypothesis using the Hopkins Ultraviolet Telescope. Nature 351, 128–130 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1038/351128a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/351128a0
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