Alternatives to the cold, collisionless dark matter (DM) paradigm in which DM behaves as a collisional fluid generically suppress small-scale structure. Herein we use the observed population of Milky Way (MW) satellite galaxies to constrain the collisional nature of DM, focusing on DM-baryon scattering. We first derive analytic upper limits on the velocity-independent DM-baryon scattering cross section by translating the upper bound on the lowest mass of halos inferred to host satellites into a characteristic cutoff scale in the linear matter power spectrum. We then confirm and improve these results through a detailed probabilistic inference of the MW satellite population that marginalizes over relevant astrophysical uncertainties. This yields $95\%$ confidence upper limits on the DM-baryon scattering cross section of $2\times10^{ -29}\ \rm{ cm}^2$ ($6\times 10^{ -27}\ \rm{ cm}^2$) for DM particle masses $m_\chi$ of~$10\ \rm{ keV}$ ($10\ \rm{ GeV}$); these limits scale as $m_\chi^{ 1/4}$ for $m_\chi \ll 1\ \rm{ GeV}$ and $m_\chi$ for~$m_\chi \gg 1\ \rm{ GeV}$. This analysis improves upon cosmological bounds derived from cosmic-microwave-background anisotropy measurements by multiple orders of magnitude over a wide range of DM masses, excluding regions of parameter space previously unexplored by other methods, including direct-detection experiments. Our work reveals a mapping between DM-baryon scattering and other alternative DM models, and we discuss the implications of our results for warm and fuzzy DM scenarios.
Categories: astro-ph.CO hep-ph