There’s a lot of weird and silly stuff on arxiv.org, but the idea behind this paper is two too weirds to pass up (that is, two orders of magnitude more “weird” than usual).

Dark Matter And The Habitability of Planets

In many models, dark matter particles can elastically scatter with nuclei in planets, causing those particles to become gravitationally bound. While the energy expected to be released through the subsequent annihilations of dark matter particles in the interior of the Earth is negligibly small (a few megawatts in the most optimistic models), larger planets that reside in regions with higher densities of slow moving dark matter could plausibly capture and annihilate dark matter at a rate high enough to maintain liquid water on their surfaces, even in the absence of additional energy from starlight or other sources. On these rare planets, it may be dark matter rather than light from a host star that makes it possible for life to emerge, evolve, and survive.

I came across this on the always-excellent astrobites.com site.