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Aseyhe t1_j47fteu wrote

Reply to comment by Kantrh in How do we know that dark matter isn't just ordinary matter our instruments can't detect? by jmite

That reads like they are ruling out the possibility that sterile neutrinos are the explanation for a particular anomaly seen in past experiments, and not that they rule out the possibility of sterile neutrinos in general.

Edit: see for example this figure from the article. They rule out parameters to the right of the red/blue curves, in particular ruling out the parameters that would have explained the "reactor antineutrino anomaly (RAA)".

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Kantrh t1_j47hta6 wrote

The article says it rejects the sterile neutrino hypothesis quite strongly, although it doesn't say it rules them out altogether from existing.

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Aseyhe t1_j47qwh0 wrote

Yeah, but in context it's the hypothesis that sterile neutrinos explain the anomaly. I edited the post above after checking the research article.

They also say, > we reject with high CL the hypothesis of a sterile neutrino of mass around 1 eV.

Viable sterile neutrino dark matter models are generally at least 1000 times heavier than that, in the keV range. That's because if the dark matter particle were too light, its thermal motion would eliminate variations in the density of the universe at the scales of dwarf galaxies, preventing those galaxies (which we observe and hence know to exist) from forming.

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